


The Storm

by shirozora



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Complete, Grogu has very little screen time but he's always on Din's mind, I have a poor understanding of what's slow and what's fast, M/M, Slow Burn, Strangers to Lovers, graysexual character, graysexual!Din Djarin, i think it's slow burn, now with some art, now with some hurt/comfort, tags subject to change with every update, what am I even doing here, what happens when you are inspired beyond all rhyme and reason by "Are you a Jedi?"
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-17
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-15 05:49:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 45,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28808373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shirozora/pseuds/shirozora
Summary: Din Djarin needs a new ship.Greef Karga makes him a deal - do some work for the guild and he'll get a brand new gunship. One such job takes him to a planet with a volatile storm system to track down a double-crossing bounty hunter. What he doesn't know is that the bounty hunter is there to loot an ancient Jedi temple. What neither of them know is that someone else is also on the planet searching for the temple.And then the storm rolls in.
Relationships: Din Djarin/Luke Skywalker
Comments: 122
Kudos: 750





	1. The Bounty

**Author's Note:**

> *insert I-don't-know-what-I-expected.gif here*
> 
> I don't know what else to say. After the Sequel Trilogy ended, I thought that was it, I'm not going to bother trying to write Star Wars fic. Joke's on me. I wrote over 30,000 words in less than 3 weeks while working full-time at the end of the first year of the pandemic. I shelved a fic I was writing at the time. I listened to Lebrock's "Dangerous Dreams" every day and wrecked my sleep schedule to write this. I really don't know what else to say.
> 
> What am I doing, why am I here, _what the fuck have I done._

Din Djarin needs a new ship.

What he wants is an untraceable pre-Empire gunship like his beloved _Razor Crest_. What he really needs is to be far away from Bo-Katan Kryze and her singular quest to reclaim Mandalore. A new ship can remedy that problem. A new ship can help him find the Armorer and the surviving members of the covert.

A new ship can take him to Grogu if the Imperial remnant goes after the kid— _his_ kid—again. He has no idea where the Jedi took Grogu but it’s the thought that counts.

Bo-Katan finally relents to his repeated requests to take him to Nevarro when she realizes it’s the only way to gain his cooperation. She can’t force him to give his word and holds nothing over him. Still, she has to get in the last word as the light cruiser arrives at his destination.

“Don’t be a stranger.”

Her eyes are always on the Darksaber. It hangs from a loop on his utility belt because at the end of the day, it is still a weapon. Her quiet obsession with it is another reason why he wants off the light cruiser; he is tired of being vigilant around her at all hours. He is tired of so many things.

Din goes down to Nevarro on an Imperial shuttle. It sets off alarms and he explains himself to five different people before Greef Karga gets wind of the situation and lets him land. Greef meets him at the spaceport and appraises the shuttle while telling Din everything that Cara Dune told him. She is due to return from Chandrila any day now.

“So,” Greef says, throwing an arm around Din’s shoulders and steering him into the city. “What brings you back to Nevarro, my friend?”

“I need another ship.”

Greef looks over his shoulder at the spaceport. “Take your pick.”

Din shakes his head. “I need something pre-Empire. Something that doesn’t come up on any Imperial or New Republic grids.”

“Ah.”

Eventually, and with the Mythrol’s help, they locate such a ship on a Mid Rim world. As a favor, Greef has the ship towed back to Nevarro, and then Din learns why. He stares at the husk of the _Auzituck_ -class gunship and then at Greef, who shrugs.

“Really,” Din says flatly. “This is the best you can do?”

“What do you mean? It’s a fine Wookiee gunship, in very good condition with an intact hull. It just needs some attention and maybe a few new parts to make it fly again.” Greef waits for a reaction, then sighs. “Look, you said the ship had to be pre-Empire. This one was made during the Clone Wars. Needs a crew of two if you want to use its laser cannons, but I can have my guys rig it for a crew of one.”

Grimacing, Din takes another look at the rusting dual-engine gunship. Greef’s words keep echoing in his head as he takes in the gunship’s considerable size. 

_“I can have my guys rig it for a crew of one.”_

He hasn’t traveled alone since Arvala-7. His life before finding Grogu is a blur, a distant dream, a fading memory of a solitary Mandalorian who chased bounties throughout the Outer Rim to support the covert. Now Grogu is finally back with his kind, but the covert is gone and the Darksaber is heavy on his belt. He is alone again.

“This ship is too big. I need something smaller.”

“Then I’ll tell them to make it smaller. This is the best I got, Mando.”

Din sighs. “What else aren’t you telling me?”

Greef scratches the back of his head and then his bearded chin. “My guy had to pull it out of a junkyard. It needs new parts inside and out if you want it to fly, which is why I said we can also make it smaller than Wookiee-sized.”

“Right. What _else_?”

Greef hems and haws. Din waits, ignoring the sinking feeling in his stomach. “I can get you those parts but they’ll cost you.”

With another heavy sigh, Din takes the lead and steers them both in the direction of the cantina. “What’s the job?”

* * *

Din loses track of time. This is intentional. He doesn’t want to think about the last time he saw Grogu. He doesn’t want to think about the small hand pressing against his bared face or the possibility that it would be the first and last time the kid—his kid—sees it.

He imagines his conversations with the Armorer if he ever finds her. He knows she’s somewhere out there, making her way through the galaxy with her hammer and the reclaimed beskar. He knows she will ask if he succeeded in his task, his quest to find the Jedi and return Grogu to them.

_“Did you find the Jedi?”_

_“Yes. I found one willing to take in the child. My quest is finished.”_

_“I see. Yet something still troubles you.”_

He never imagines asking her about the Darksaber. He never asks her if the songs and stories are true, if winning the Darksaber in combat makes him Mand’alor of a dead planet and a scattered people. He never asks if he has any choice in the matter, if he’s destined or doomed to rule a world he never set foot on, a world he cannot call “home”.

He always imagines asking her about something else.

_“I… removed my helmet in front of another living being, twice. The first time, the child was taken from me and I needed to obtain information to find him. No one who saw my face that day still lives.”_

He never mentions Miggs Mayfeld. Miggs said he saw nothing and Din took him at his word.

_“And the second time?”_

_“It was… it was when the Jedi came to take the child. The child had never seen my face but I… he is my clan, my family. I couldn’t let him leave until he saw me.”_

The Armorer never tells him if he broke the creed. She never tells him her thoughts, and so he never tells her about Bo-Katan and the Night Owls, the way they called him a “child of the Watch” like he understood nothing about the ways of Mandalore. Instead, the Armorer asks another question.

_“And what of the Jedi?”_

Din can never answer the imaginary Armorer. The Jedi was the only other person on the bridge facing him, but Din unmasked himself for Grogu and nobody else. The others, even Bo-Katan and Koska Reeves, looked away until the helmet was back on his head.

_“I showed my face in the presence of someone who is considered an enemy of our people, but I showed it for the sake of the child. Everything I did was for him so that he could be where he belongs. Am I… am I still following the creed? Is this still the way?”_

The imaginary Armorer never answers him. The uncertainty stews in his mind during the long stretches of time between worlds and bounties. He has nothing else but time on his borrowed ships to reexamine everything he knows about the Tribe, Bo-Katan, and the Way of the Mandalore.

Din is on his fourth mission for Greef. He borrows a ship from Greef each time he gets a new bounty puck and the one he’s piloting now had been refitted with a carbonite freezing chamber. Greef was adamant that his current target be brought back alive.

“You’re the only one I know who can guarantee it,” Greef had said. “Bring that kriffing double-crossing Rodian in alive and I’ll add a freezing chamber to the weapons locker on your Wookiee gunship.”

“Fine,” Din replied while studying the puck of a bounty hunter named Cheen Yofree. “And stop calling it a Wookiee gunship.”

Din takes out the puck again as well as the accompanying tracking fob, which blinks steadily as he approaches his destination. Vos-3 is a planet straddling the border between the Outer and Mid Rims. Information on Vos-3 is limited; it was once an inhabited world but a natural cataclysm resulted in massive, debilitating electrical storm systems that roamed the planet at will, bringing down ships and scrambling signals so that no one could enter or leave. During a window of several days of clear skies, the survivors fled and never returned.

He feels for the nameless, faceless people who were forced from their homes and scattered throughout the galaxy. He can’t imagine what they left behind that is now of interest to a bounty hunter or their client. How much is Cheen’s client paying that he would brave Vos-3’s storms to plunder the ruins?

A scan shows a planet that is predominantly oceans and mountains, gray peaks towering over storming seas. The southern end of Vos-3 is frozen over while the northern end is a massive crater filled with icy blue water. Three small moons circle the planet, all barren pockmarked rocks without a hint of life on or within them. Din steers the ship around Vos-3, searching for greenery. Here and there are landmasses, each surrounded by mountains and water. Half of Vos-3 is shrouded in dark clouds that flicker and glow with an inner light. The ship starts issuing warnings so he turns away from that half of the planet. Cheen wouldn’t be there.

The fob starts blinking more rapidly as he descends into the planet’s atmosphere. Here, the clouds are few and white, giving him a clear view of the rapidly expanding landmass down below. There are rivers and valleys and huge green forests, all surrounded by jagged mountains and a frothy blue-gray sea. Somewhere down there is his target. Din circles around a particularly dense forest, searching for enough space to land while being mindful of the blinking fob. He sets the ship down on a hill, powers down the engines, and sits back in his seat with a sigh.

“Well,” he tells no one. “Time to get to work.”

He packs light and fast. He crams charges and ammunition into his bandolier, shoves rations and more charges into a waterproof satchel, and tucks a pair of cuffs into his belt. He hesitates, then takes up the beskar staff and hooks it to his back. He considers his jetpack but where he’s going, the area is heavily forested and the only way to fly would be to clear the trees. The thick canopy would obscure his view of the ground and he’d be easy to spot from a distance. Din stashes it in a locker instead.

He checks for his vibro-knife and blaster pistol, and then for the Darksaber while knowing it hasn’t left his side since he took it from Moff Gideon. It is a poor substitute for Grogu but like Grogu, he has to keep it close. He looks down to make sure it’s on his belt, then picks up the tracking fob and puck, and leaves the ship.

* * *

Two days pass before he finally picks up Cheen’s trail. The fob is indispensable; the undergrowth is wild and thick while the canopy blocks out the Vos system’s sun. If not for his chronometer, Din would’ve lost track of time. He trundles through the forest at a slower pace than he’d like, mindful of his steps in the damp earth, the treacherous knots of tree roots, the low-hanging branches and towering bushes, the wildlife that watches him reproachfully as he struggles past. They don’t flee, having lost their fear of people like him long ago.

The fob blinks steadily and rapidly, telling him Cheen Yofree isn’t too far away, that the Rodian bounty hunter is still on this planet and within reach. On the third morning, Din drops down from the tree where he’d sheltered. From his perch high up in the branches, he’d seen dark gray clouds gathering in the distance, a warning that Vos-3’s electrical storms are coming toward him and his borrowed ship. He’s running out of time. He immediately takes out the fob and hurries through the forest.

The fob chimes loudly and he stops to look around. He notices broken branches, disturbed bushes, the churned mud and grass. Someone had come through here not too long ago. He taps a command on his left vambrace and brings up multiple footprints in different shapes, sizes, and strides, all moving in one direction. Cheen brought a whole crew with him, something Greef neglected to mention. He shakes his head and presses forward.

He follows their tracks through the woods. Cheen’s crew travel like a bantha herd, trampling down everything in their path. As Din crosses a creek, he hears snapping twigs to his left and whirls around, hand falling to his pistol. A dappled, six-legged creature stares back at him with large dark eyes. It brays and then trots away. Din watches it vanish into the shadows but his helmet notices something else—a set of footprints following Cheen’s crew at a distance. Frowning, Din hurries over to them and walks a little way to see if someone from the crew had stepped away for a bit. These tracks come from a completely different direction. Whoever owns these footprints isn’t with Cheen.

Din’s blood runs cold. Someone else had come here to track the Rodian. Didn’t Greef say he gave Din this job to ensure Cheen came back to Nevarro alive? Or was that a lie, too? How many fobs did Greef pass around before baiting him with the promise of a brand new freezing chamber?

“Some things don’t change,” he sighs to no one and hurries back to the main trail. He’s now racing against both the encroaching storms and this other bounty hunter who might not care how Cheen returns to the guild.

Din’s chronometer counts twenty minutes before he stumbles into some ruins. They look to be the remnants of a town. While the weeds and brush and trees grow thick here, the forest hasn’t fully reclaimed these grounds and the long-abandoned buildings. Din walks cautiously down what was once a street, scanning for footprints and suspicious heat signatures. One hand holds the rapidly blinking fob and the other rests on his holster.

The lack of vegetation means Din has a clearer view of the sky than he’s had in days, and the sky is gray. A cold, damp wind is beginning to blow, twisting his cape around his legs.

“Dank farrik,” he mutters and picks up his pace. He has no plans to ride out the storm with Cheen.

All footsteps lead to a terraced stone building several stories high and covered almost completely in moss, fern, and vines. The gusts pick up speed and strength, pushing and pulling at him, and Din spends a few precious seconds untangling his cape from his knee before entering the building. He notices a blue butterfly clinging stubbornly to a vine hanging over the entrance as the wind begins to howl and wonders why it doesn’t just fly away.

The tracking fob flashes so brightly in the dim hall that Din finally switches it off and tucks it in his belt. He doesn’t need to know that Cheen and his crew are somewhere in here. He follows their tracks down the main hall, past smaller hallways and alcoves, and up stone steps. He looks around every few seconds to take stock of his surroundings; few sculptures and carvings decorate the walls and spaces, and they’ve all been worn away by time and the elements. He gets the sense that this building may have once been of religious significance to the town surrounding it. It must have been a temple once and could hold priceless treasures. No wonder Cheen’s client sent him here.

Din finds no tracks from the other bounty hunter, which is concerning. It could also mean something befell that other person, making _his_ job easier. Still, he draws out his pistol while going up the next flight of stairs.

On the fourth floor, Din hears a commotion. Ahead is a wide dark hallway and the sounds of a struggle echo back to him. There’s shouting and screaming, flesh and bone slamming into stone, and the unmistakable sound of panicked blaster fire. The other bounty hunter had somehow beaten Din to the target.

“Damn it.”

He runs.

The hallway opens up to some kind of ritual room. Pillars surround a dais displaying statues that are little more than stone nubs. There are no walls at the back of the room, giving Din a view of dark clouds rolling over the forest and the town. A body flies across the room and crashes into a pillar. Din whirls around to see five people trying to drive another person toward the back of the room where no wall will catch them if they fall. Three more lie dead around the room and a fourth, the Melbu that flew into a pillar, is getting back to their feet. Din shoots them and scans the room for his Rodian target. Cheen is among the five fighting the other bounty hunter, cursing wildly while firing his blaster.

Something blindingly bright bounces off the wall next to Din’s head. Cheen shoots the other bounty hunter again but the bolt ricochets and smashes into a pillar. Frustrated, Cheen snaps at a Devaronian to pummel the other hunter, looks around wildly to count heads, and spots Din lingering at the entryway.

“Forget him, kill Mando!” Cheen screams and points his pistol at Din.

Din flings himself away, rolls on his shoulders, and crashes into the base of a pillar. He staggers to his feet, aims, and shoots the Trandoshan next to Cheen. His shot glances off of the Trandoshan’s armored shoulder. Swearing, he ducks behind the pillar while the Trandoshan and Cheen open fire. He lays out the ritual room and the positions of Cheen’s crew in his head, guessing where everyone will be when the blaster fire eases up. It wouldn’t take more than four moves, max, to isolate Cheen but the other bounty hunter can and will complicate things. He still hasn’t gotten a good look at the other assailant; all he could make out was a dark shape against the backdrop of an increasingly stormy sky.

“Tell Karga I’m not coming back!” Cheen yells over the blaster fire. “He owes _me_ , not the other way around!”

“Tell him yourself,” Din says loudly.

“Or I kill you and your friend, take your beskar and my loot, and he gets to wonder where you went for the next hundred years-”

Someone screams. Blaster fire lets up almost immediately. Din takes a deep breath and leans out the side of the pillar, pistol pointing at where he last saw Cheen. What he sees instead is a human mercenary flying through the air and crashing into the wall with a sickening crack. Cheen and his three remaining companions are backing up into each other, rifles and pistols pointing frantically between Din and the other bounty hunter. Din looks at them, too—and nearly drops his pistol.

“You! What are you doing here?”

Cheen’s other assailant, dressed and cloaked in black, lowers his gloved right hand. The other holds an old pistol. A gleaming hilt hangs from his belt.

Cheen looks between them. “You’re not with him?”

“Not exactly,” Din says. “I’m here for the Rodian, Jedi.”

“Kill Mando, Jedi, and I’ll let you leave this planet alive,” Cheen says hurriedly. “I’ll even give you a share of the reward. What do you say?”

The Jedi’s hooded head turns to Din. He catches the quirk of a smile before the Jedi faces Cheen and says, “Hand over the relics you stole and I’ll look the other way.”

“Stole? Who did I steal from? No one’s lived here for a thousand years. I was here first. I found them first. They’re mine!”

“Wrong,” the Jedi says calmly. He steps forward and the air suddenly feels electric. “Those relics belong to the Jedi, of which I am one. Therefore, they belong to me. Hand them over.”

Cheen looks between Din and the Jedi, confused and increasingly desperate. “You—you came all this way and killed my men over a bunch of _books_?”

“You came to this planet to steal them,” the Jedi replies calmly, “after intercepting communications between me and an associate. So yes, I came all this way for a bunch of books. We can do this peacefully and no one gets hurt, or….”

The Jedi dips his head toward Din. Din says nothing but gestures with his pistol at Cheen and his surviving crew to lower their weapons. He can almost see the calculations running through Cheen’s head; the Rodian is making the same mistake so many others made and assuming superior numbers can overwhelm a Mandalorian, even one sheathed in pure beskar.

Cheen would be thinking differently if he saw what the Jedi did to a platoon of dark troopers on a light cruiser far, far away.

What Din doesn’t expect is the Devaronian flinging a smoke bomb at his feet. Thick smoke billows in his face and he jerks back. He then hears the unmistakable sound of a thermal detonator counting down.

“Get down!” he tells at the Jedi, runs behind a pillar, and braces himself.

The explosion knocks him to his knees. Parts of the ceiling break off and crumble, and a chunk of stone slams into the back of his helmet. Stars explode behind his eyes and his ears ring loudly. An impossibly strong hand grabs his upper arm and hauls him to his feet. Din immediately elbows its body and turns his pistol on who he thinks is the Devaronian.

“Are you all right?” It’s the Jedi. His cloak and cowl are dusty but he looks far better than Din feels.

“I’m—I’m fine, I’m fine.” He looks around; they’re standing on the ledge, a few feet from a four-story drop. A gusty wet wind is already blowing away the smoke from the bombs. Half of the pillars had shattered in the blast as did the stone sculptures on the dais. Rubble covers the bodies of Cheen’s fallen crew but Cheen himself is missing. “Where’d he go?”

“Down the stairs,” the Jedi says. “They won’t get far.”

“You don’t know that,” Din says, picks his way over debris and dead mercenaries, and runs into the hall. He inputs a command on his vambrace and sees four pairs of footprints skittering down the stairs. “Damn it.”

He catches Cheen scrambling in the dark on the ground floor with his three remaining men. He shoots at the Trandoshan first, who stumbles, roars in pain, and whirls around to return fire. It hits his pistol and he drops it. Din then launches his whipcord at the Trandoshan’s feet and pulls them to the ground. He unhooks the beskar staff from his back and swings it, knocking the Trandoshan out.

Something pings off his pauldron. He turns to see the human mercenary fling a throwing knife at him; he ducks and then lunges forward with the staff. The mercenary leaps out of the way and throws another knife. Din jerks away at the last second and it grazes his upper arm. As he swings his staff at the mercenary, his arm starts to pull and burn; the knife had cut through the sleeve and nicked him.

Din looks behind him. The Jedi is nowhere to be seen and he groans inwardly. So the Jedi will stroll through an Imperial light cruiser and decimate a platoon of advanced battle droids but scurry away from a scuffle between bounty hunters in the belly of an ancient temple. Wonderful.

He ducks another blaster bolt and the Devaronian charges out of the shadows, slamming him into the wall. His head smashes against both his helmet and stone. His ears are ringing again and he can’t tell where his feet are. The Devaronian grabs him by his wounded arm and throws him to the ground. The wind gets knocked out of him and Din struggles to catch his breath and get a bearing on his surroundings while the Devaronian approaches. He raises his hands and realizes he’s not holding the staff.

“Nice spear, Mando,” Cheen says somewhere ahead of him, or behind him. Perhaps next to him. “What’s this, pure beskar? Lucky me. Imagine how much it’ll bring in Hutta Town-”

Din primes his whistling birds. A heavy boot slams into his side and he curls over, groaning, gritting his teeth against the pain. Hard hands grab his right pauldron to pry it off and now he panics. It bears his signet and Cheen can’t have it. He curls his hand to launch the whistling birds but the heel of another boot presses down on his left hand, grinding it into the ground for good measure. His mind races. _Flash charges._ If he can shake off the Devaronian with a sudden burst and set one off, that’ll create his opening. He just needs to get his right arm back.

The boot on his left hand lifts away. The human mercenary screams.

“Put me down! Put me down!” they shout while Cheen also starts yelling in panic.

Left hand and arm free but not knowing what’s happening, Din decides against the birds and instead activates his flamethrower. He points at the Devaronian’s hands, forcing them off his pauldron and lighting up the wide hall. Din doesn’t actually need it but he can now see why the mercenary and Cheen started screaming. The human mercenary floats in the air, scrambling for the ceiling, the walls, the ground, the Devaronian, Cheen, anything to bring them back to earth. Din gets a glimpse of the Jedi standing a short distance away, his hand raised in the human mercenary’s direction.

“What—what is this sorcery?” Cheen stammers. “You, stop him! Take him down!”

The Devaronian charges the Jedi while Cheen takes off in another direction. Din staggers to his feet. The ground sways in all directions but forward, and he really needs to move forward; the Rodian is making a break for freedom with Din’s beskar staff. In his concussed and battered state, Din has no hope of catching the fleet-footed Rodian so he yanks his vibro-knife out of his boot and throws it.

He was aiming for one of Cheen’s legs but Din is no Xi’an and he already knows his vibor-knife isn’t going to make it. It sails through the air… and keeps sailing. Somehow, the vibro-knife rises even higher and then falls heavily on top of Cheen’s head. The Rodian collapses, dropping Din’s beskar staff and a stuffed knapsack.

Something pings against his helmet and Din turns to see the human mercenary waving a pistol at him. Din grabs the Trandoshan’s dropped blaster and shoots the mercenary dead. He catches their pistol and turns around to see the Devaronian try to slam the Jedi into the ground. Their heavy punches keep missing. The Jedi is shockingly agile even though he’s wearing a long cloak that should get him tangled up. His laser sword remains untouched, hanging from his belt.

Ready for this mission to be over, Din aims and shoots the Devaronian in the back of the head. They stagger; he pulls the trigger again and they drop at the Jedi’s feet. The Jedi stares down at the body and then up at Din with a reproachful expression.

“I had it under control, you know.”

“I’m sure you did,” he says, holstering the mercenary’s pistol and searching for his. “You took too long. Also, I have a lot of questions for you starting with why you’re here and not with the-”

The Jedi’s eyes widen. Something lurches and shuffles behind Din; the Trandoshan isn’t dead. Din twists around to see a shape looming over him. Without thinking, he grabs the Darksaber, activates the blade, and slashes the Trandoshan across the chest. The blade sinks through layers of armor and fabric and sears through hide, flesh, and bone. The Trandoshan falls back with a surprised grunt, hands clawing at the deep slashing wound as they collapse on the ground. They make a gurgling, pained sound and then exhale.

The Darksaber thrums in his hand, the black blade glowing white around the edges. Din huffs, disappointed in himself for using it when he could’ve just set the Trandoshan’s face on fire. Or punched that scaly head, even if it breaks his knuckles. Hell, he could’ve just bashed it in with his beskar helm. He had so many options but he used the Darksaber.

He withdraws the blade and faces the Jedi, expecting another disapproving expression. Instead, he sees utter confusion.

The Jedi points at the hilt in his hand. “That’s a lightsaber.”

* * *

The Jedi’s story, told in spurts as they carried bodies out of the ritual room and down four flights of stairs—Din wanted to push them off the ledge to collect down below but the Jedi refused—was that when he wasn’t teaching, he was traveling through the galaxy in search of Jedi relics. Fifteen days ago, one of his associates discovered mention of a Jedi temple on Vos-3, a world abandoned before the High Republic era, in an old text and sent the Jedi a communique. This was what Cheen intercepted. This is why they’re all here.

Din can understand wanting to recover lost Jedi artifacts. He can understand the desire to find these seemingly lost ruins and recover forgotten memories. From what he gathered, the Jedi are so reduced in number that they are nearly extinct; while people still sing and tell stories of Mandalore, almost no one seems to remember the Jedi. The Empire knew well how to purge a people, a homeworld, a culture, a religion, a _memory_.

That is still no excuse for leaving Grogu’s side.

“Kriffing hell,” the Jedi sighs after Din accuses him of doing just that for the fourth time while they’re carrying the Melbu’s body down the second-last flight of stairs. Now that he’s had to roll up his metaphorical sleeves, the Jedi no longer has the air of a supernaturally powerful being. He reminds Din more of a young Mandalorian stuck doing grunt work. “Grogu is _safe_. Everyone is safe. Nobody is in danger of being attacked or kidnapped by an Imperial remnant. This I promise and will keep promising.”

“You gave your word you’ll protect him with your life and you’re _here_ , not over _there_ where he is. Who exactly is watching him?”

“Everyone is,” the Jedi says. “Hey!”

Din drops his half of the Melbu. “You left your—your students alone to watch each other?”

“Well, Artoo is always there.”

“Artoo?”

The Jedi sighs again. “My astromech.”

“Your-” Din remembers an old blue and white droid rolling up behind the Jedi and whistling to Grogu like it knows him. Still. “You left Grogu in the care of an _astromech_?”

The Jedi chews his lip. Finally, and with a strange reluctance, he says, “And my sister. She was one of my students. My first student, actually, but she stopped training after a year. Grogu is my second.”

Din is speechless.

The Jedi sighs. “It’s only been five years since the Empire fell. If I’m to rebuild the Jedi Order, I need to know _what_ it was. The Empire destroyed everything and there’s nobody left who can tell me. I showed my sister what my masters taught me and she helps teach Grogu when I’m out searching for these relics, these memories of the Jedi.” The Jedi suddenly smiles, eyes distant. “I didn’t have as much time with my masters as I’d like, but they taught me what was most important… and the rest was what I learned on my own. All my discoveries, all my lessons, all my mistakes, everything that I’m now passing on to Grogu and my future students.”

The only thing Din manages to grasp is that the Jedi’s sister shares his powers but isn’t also a Jedi. Well, that and that Din had entrusted Grogu’s future to someone who’s still learning about the Jedi himself.

Somehow, the Jedi already knows what he’s thinking. “We’re twins, but we didn’t grow up together. We found out after I finished my training and by then, there was nobody left to teach her. After a year, she decided her path laid elsewhere but she supports what I do and steps in when I can’t be with Grogu. They know why I leave. What I do here is for him and for the future of the Jedi Order.”

The Jedi stares at him defiantly, the rebellious youthful set of his jaw completely at odds with the almost mythical aura he exuded hours earlier while helping Din strike down Cheen’s crew. It dawns on Din that the Jedi might be younger than—he _must_ be younger than Din. How else is he so vibrant and hopeful about resurrecting a lost order that the Empire so thoroughly purged from collective memory? How else is he so naive—no, Din can’t think like that. This Jedi is Grogu’s only hope. Whatever doubts Din has about the young Jedi master, he needs to keep to himself… for now.

The Jedi is the one looking at him oddly now, head tilted, pale eyes boring through the beskar helm. Din shakes himself out of his sudden reverie and picks up the Melbu’s feet. “I still don’t like it, but if these old books can help Grogu then I’ll drop it.”

The Jedi looks relieved. He even smiles and it’s brighter than his youth. “Now that I’ve answered your questions, can we get back to this-” He gestures at the stiffening body between them. “-instead of arguing about my methods?”

By the time they get the last body down to the first floor, the clouds have broken open and a steady downpour dissuades them from digging graves or lighting a pyre outside. Din crouches next to the Devaronian’s body and searches their clothes and armor for weapons and ammunition. He expects the Jedi to say something smart but the Jedi isn’t nearby. Instead, he is next to the unconscious Cheen, who’d been cuffed and trussed up with some rope Din found on one of the human mercenaries. The Jedi is looking through Cheen’s satchel carefully, inspecting its contents.

The next minutes pass in a strange, companionable silence while the rain comes down harder and faster. Din eventually amasses an impressive stockpile of ammunition, firearms, grenades, all manners of knives, rope, and rations. He also finally finds his pistol and holsters it while getting back onto his feet. He looks at the Jedi, who’s holding a small handheld light to the tattered pages of a hand-bound tome. The Jedi’s eyes glimmer in the light.

“You know,” Din says, then stops and clears his throat. “We need to do something about these bodies before they bloat, burst open, and rot.”

The Jedi looks up at him, then at the bodies, and then up the hall to the entrance. The rain is now so heavy it looks like a grayish curtain, sealing them inside this cold, old, dark temple. “I’m not going out there.”

Din pulls out one of his flash charges. “Guess we’ll just have to burn the bodies here.”

It takes some work—and liberal use of Din’s flamethrowers—to set a pile of dead bodies alight at the other end of the long wide hall. Din leaves the pyre to burn once he knows the fire won’t sputter and fade, but the Jedi stands vigil for longer. He glances at the shadowy figure while crouching to gather up the pilfered rations. Cheen’s crew packed light, probably thinking this a quick and easy job lasting just a few days. Din has his own supply but there’s no telling how long storms last on Vos-3. That could be a problem if this storm outlasts their supplies.

White light flashes outside the building. A few seconds later, thunder rolls overhead. The temple grounds shudder and dislodge crumbling stone. Din shakes off the debris and looks up but the ceiling doesn’t collapse.

“According to my associate,” the Jedi says softly next to Din, and where did he come from? “Once the storms began, the people here couldn’t stay. Their ships could not launch or land without crashing or breaking apart midair. The rains flooded their villages, towns, and cities, drowned their crops, livestock, the young and the old. Among the survivors, the damp and cold lodged in their bodies. They sickened and died. Their home had betrayed them and they couldn’t even send for help because nothing could get through the storms. So once the storms moved on, the people left. They never came back.”

Din stares down the hall at the sheets of rain blurring his view of the ghost town surrounding the temple. Lightning flashes again, followed by thunder. A gust of cold damp air sweeps down the hall and nearly puts out the pyre. Cheen shivers involuntarily and even the Jedi looks uneasy.

“So we’re stuck here until the rains stop,” Din says. He scuffs at the ground, sweeping aside as much dirt as he can with his feet until he uncovers stone. He detaches his staff from his back, leans it against the wall, and sits down. Once he does, the very long and shocking day starts catching up to him. He looks up at the Jedi, who’s still standing tall. “Did that text tell your associate how long these storms last?”

The Jedi grimaces. “No.”

He sighs. Every new thing he learns about Vos-3 is worse than the previous factoid. “This is bad. If these storms last three days, fine, we’ll just wait them out. If they go fifteen, twenty, thirty days, we’ll be stuck here for all of them because nobody will be able to fly without being blown out of the sky. What if the storms last for even longer? Does anyone even know you’re here?”’

“My associate but he wouldn’t be able to help.” The Jedi points up as more thunder rumbles past.

“Great.” He can’t stop thinking about time lost to the storm system, time that the Jedi is wasting here when he should be with Grogu. Din wants to say something but he said he wouldn’t. He sighs inwardly.

“I know what you’re thinking,” the Jedi says, scowling down at him. His gaze drifts to the side and he frowns for a different reason. “You’re hurt.”

Din blinks. “What?” He follows the Jedi’s gaze to his upper arm where a mercenary’s knife had slashed through layers of heavy fabric and into his arm. He raises his arm to his helmet and sees dried flaking blood around an angry red gash. “Damn. Forgot about that. Or my medpacs.”

“You brought everything but supplies to heal yourself? I’m surprised. Luckily, your Rodian friend here stashed plenty of them in his knapsack.” The Jedi pulls one out of the bag near Cheen’s bound feet and tosses it to DIn. “Need help?”

“No.”

After cleaning the wound and covering it with a bacta patch, Din leans back against the wall and tries to find a comfortable yet watchful position to settle into. The Jedi lingers, still on his feet, looking restless even after the day he had. After a while, Din realizes the Jedi keeps glancing at him.

“If you have something to say, say it.”

“It’s nothing. Actually, it’s something. That blade… you know it’s a lightsaber, right?”

Din’s hand falls to the hilt on his belt. “Darksaber. It’s called the Darksaber.”

“It’s a lightsaber. I can sense the kyber in the hilt. How did you come by it?”

Din has no idea what the Jedi is talking about, nor is he in the mood to explain his personal history with it. He doesn’t want to share its greater significance to Mandalorians, either. Neither Bo-Katan nor Koska, nor Axe Woves who had reunited with them after completing a mission no one explained to him, told him much else about the Darksaber’s recent history. He only knows that it fell into Moff Gideon’s hands during the Great Purge, that it was likely taken in combat, and that Bo-Katan couldn’t just take it from Din when he offered it up to her. What did the moff say again about the black blade?

_“The Darksaber doesn’t have power. The story does.”_

Din knew little of those stories, those songs. What he knows is that Bo-Katan is trying to control that story; she must’ve realized Din had no one else to turn to for the Darksaber’s full history. That was another reason why he started taking jobs with the guild again. Once the gunship is able to fly, he can find other clans and tribes on his own. He can learn the stories, the secrets the Darksaber held, and perhaps even the secrets Bo-Katan keeps. He can find the Armorer, who will know how to help him get rid of the Darksaber.

Or she will tell Din he earned the right to wield the Darksaber and it is now his task to reunite the lost people of Mandalore.

But that is for the future. Today, he is just tired and more than mildly annoyed with the Jedi.

“It’s a long story and I’m not in the mood,” Din says. “Since you’re wide awake, you can take the first watch.”

“I’m pretty sure there’s nothing dangerous out there to watch for.”

“Can’t be too careful,” he says, folds his arms tightly, and closes his eyes.


	2. The Temple

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for your kind comments and kudos. I'm very poor about responding to them but know they are greatly appreciated.

Din wakes up to a parched throat, a pounding headache, and bruising all over his body. The Devaronian did not hold back and beskar can only protect him from so much brute force. Groaning, he sits up and then bows his head, eyes squeezing shut as everything swims inside and outside his helm.

“... finally awake,” Cheen grumbles somewhere to his right. “Jedi fell asleep some time ago and left me lying face first in the dirt. I’m thirsty, Mando. I’m not dying of thirst while there’s rain just outside this damn place.”

“Not… now. Quiet.”

“I’m not a moisture farm here, I can’t just suck water out of the air-”

Din kicks out at the Rodian’s bound feet. “Told you to be quiet.”

Cheen is silent for a few blessed seconds. Then, “Guess it’s a good thing I paid that Devaronian his rates. He was expensive.”

Din sighs, defeated. His mouth is so dry that his tongue might crack. He grabs his canteen and carefully lifts up the bottom of his helmet to take two gulps of water. He lets the helmet slide back over his chin and waits for the throbbing in his head to subside. It dulls just enough for him to get to his feet and walk over to Cheen.

“We’re stuck here for the next several days,” Din says while watching Cheen tip the canteen’s contents into his mouth with his cuffed hands. “I suggest you don’t give me a reason to skin you like a womp rat before we land on Nevarro.”

Cheen stares at him with large eyes. “You can’t lay a hand on me. Karga wants me alive.”

“He never said _how_ alive,” Din replies. “And my ship comes with a carbonite freezing chamber. You remember what happened to the Mythrol.”

He takes back the canteen, tosses Cheen a ration pack, and crosses the hall to the only other living being in the temple. The Jedi is sitting up against the wall, curled up under his black cloak with his knees drawn up to his chest. Din stares down at him and then notices something odd about his right hand. It is always gloved compared to his left, which is bare and marked with old, faint scars. The way the Jedi folded into himself pulled at his sleeves, revealing a metallic glint in the gap between cuff and glove. Is his right hand cybernetic?

“It’s cybernetic,” the Jedi mumbles. He cracks an eye open and stares up at Din. His gaze is weathered and hollow, like he’d been dreaming of dark things. “I lost it while fighting in the Rebellion.”

Din remembers the X-Wing but doesn’t recall hearing anything about a sorcerer fighting in the war. “You were a part of it?”

The Jedi’s gaze sharpens into curiosity as it searches Din’s helmet. He then smiles and says, “You must’ve seen my X-Wing.”

“New Republic flies them, too. Are you also Republic?”

The Jedi shrugs. “Not exactly. My sister is but… well, I’m a Jedi. I help when the Senate asks but I’m mostly busy doing Jedi things.”

“Jedi things,” Din echoes. “Like teaching people how to use their powers and flying to Jedi ruins to search for old books.”

“Not just books. Any kind of Jedi artifact someone hid away or left behind. Whatever can help me understand what was lost or rebuild what the Empire destroyed.”

The words leave a pang in Din’s chest but he doesn’t look too closely. He doesn’t reach for the Darksaber hilt. “I met someone while searching for the Jedi and she told me something about Grogu’s past. He was already a student when the Empire rose to power and survived the… purge that wiped out the Jedi.”

“I know,” the Jedi says quietly. He curls up even tighter under his cloak, looking strangely small for someone with such command over his powers. “Grogu told me as much as he was willing to. The rest, I put together from the old archives and what I already recovered. I can’t… imagine what it was like to survive something so awful. Knowing you lived when so many others died, hiding yourself, closing yourself off from the Force, forgetting what it means to be a Jedi just to survive. He lived through far more than I ever will.”

He sounds pained, like Grogu’s past is personal to him. Din almost reaches out to—to do what, exactly? He curls his fingers instead, keeping them at his side. “We went to Tython so that Grogu could choose whether or not he wanted to be a Jedi.”

“And he chose to be one again,” the Jedi says fondly. “What would’ve happened if he chose otherwise?”

Din wonders how to explain. “He is a foundling, a child with no known family. We, my tribe, take in foundlings and raise them until we return them to their kind or until they come of age and are ready to choose.”

“Really? Do all Mandalorians do that or just your tribe?”

He thinks about Boba Fett, whose chain code revealed his father was Mandalorian the way Din is, who refused to see himself as Mandalorian but spoke and acted as one. He thinks about Bo-Katan, who called him a child of the Watch and Boba an imposter in his father’s armor. Din thinks about the Armorer, who always told him that the foundlings were the future and gave him and Grogu their signet and clan.

“I don’t know, but my tribe does,” Din reluctantly admits. “After my parents died, they took me in and raised me as one of their own. When I came of age, I swore myself to the creed. If Grogu had chosen not to be a Jedi, he would be offered that choice when the time came.”

“I’m not sure any helmet you design would fit his ears,” the Jedi muses.

Despite himself, Din laughs. He’d imagined it now and then during the quiet hours on the _Razor Crest_ , wondering what would happen if they never found Grogu’s kind or if he rejected the way of the Jedi. The kid will outlive him but if Din manages to find the covert before the inevitable happens, then they can continue raising Grogu in his stead. They can be the ones to offer him the choice; if he chooses to walk the way of the Mandalore, then that armorer will have their work cut out for them and they will do their work gladly for one of their own.

“Probably why he called out to you instead. Jedi don’t need helmets.”

The Jedi’s visible eye is extraordinarily bright. Din recalls seeing the Jedi’s face while unmasked, with nothing to filter out distracting lights and colors. He remembers how blue the Jedi’s eyes are.

There’s a scuffling noise behind him and he turns around while the Jedi finally lifts his head and unfolds himself. Cheen is crumpling up the remains of the ration pack, looking disgusted with whatever he’s chewing on.

“Don’t tell me I’m spending the next however many days it’s raining listening to you chatter away about nonsense.”

With a sigh, Din strides over to Cheen and crouches in front of him. “You’re spending the next however many days it’s raining listening to us chatter away because _you_ decided to come here to steal from the Jedi.”

“Again with the stealing! I’m not stealing from anyone because nobody who lived here is still alive. They’re all dead!”

“You’re wrong,” the Jedi declares in a voice as strong as beskar. He stands behind Din, looking down at the Rodian. “The people who once lived on this planet are long gone, but the Jedi are very much alive. They’re still here and these texts now belong to them.”

Cheen looks up at him. “And what are these Jedi? Cultists with magic powers?”

“From a certain point of view,” the Jedi replies. “We are guardians of peace and justice.”

His words sound strangely rote like he’s still searching for a better definition. Cheen huffs, not buying the Jedi’s answer as it’s given. “Sounds like a bunch of poodoo. If that’s true, then where were you during the war?”

The Jedi doesn’t answer. Din spares a glance over his shoulder and sees no one there. Damn Jedi moves too quietly for his peace of mind.

“What did I say?”

Din shakes his head and stands. “Enough.”

He leaves Cheen to grumble over his sorry situation and looks around the ground floor for the Jedi. He’s nowhere to be found. The rain has been relentless and no one wants to get caught in it, so the only other place to go is up. The Jedi can take care of himself so Din picks up several salvaged firearms, sits a little ways from Cheen, and takes them apart one by one to clean and reassemble.

His thoughts wander while he goes through the motions. So the Jedi fought in the Rebellion and lost his right hand. Did anyone in the Rebel Alliance know he was a Jedi? Cara swore up and down that she knew of no such Jedi serving with the New Republic, otherwise she would’ve told him. Did the Jedi hide himself like Grogu did? Did he know what he was before joining the fight? Does Ahsoka Tano know him? Din makes a mental note to ask her if they ever cross paths again.

Does the Jedi know about her? Din should tell him; everything he’s heard suggests the Jedi had been on his own until Grogu called to him. What a lonely life it must be shouldering the past, present, and future of an entire people and order.

Din counts about two hours on his chronometer before worry starts gnawing at him. Cheen dozed off while cursing just about everything that wronged him and is now snoring, a grating sound that echoes up and down the hall. Sighing, Din tosses a poorly manufactured blaster rifle onto the pile next to him and gets up. The Rodian isn’t going anywhere even if he somehow kicks free of the rope around his legs, so Din climbs the stairs to the second floor of the temple. 

Unlike the first and fourth floors, the second floor is walled off on all sides, muffling the sounds of the thunderstorm outside. It’s less humid but still uncomfortably cold and still. Din treads through the dark, searching for footprints. He passes through empty halls and collapsed doorways, and only stops briefly to look around a huge space with a high ceiling. He doesn’t know what this floor was for. He eventually makes his way back to the stairs and finds red footprints going up the steps.

“Idiot,” he tells himself and climbs the stairs to the next floor.

The Jedi’s trail continues past the third floor and stops at the fourth. Curious, Din walks down the wide hall to the ritual room. As he gets closer, the downpour and thunder become an all-consuming roar. The storm is relentless and wild, but no wind howls down the hall at him. He wonders why until he reaches the ritual room. Though half of the room is open to the elements, something holds back the storm. Din looks up and around, staring at the rubble from yesterday’s firefight floating in the air; stones slowly rotate like planets do on their axes. He circles the room, half his attention on the storm raging against the temple and half on the Jedi sitting cross-legged on the dais, facing the broken bases of the fallen statues.

Din tilts his head. The Jedi is _floating_. He does it so effortlessly while lifting all of the loose stones in the room and holding them in the air when Grogu passed out every time he used his powers—the Force, it’s the Force—to lift a mudhorn off the ground or throw fire back at an incinerator trooper. But of course, the Jedi is a master who didn’t have to hide himself for decades. Grogu did but one day he’ll be able to do these things with little effort. Din wonders if he’ll be able to see that when—his head slams into a floating rock and the Jedi’s eyes snap open.

“Sorry,” Din says hastily, backing away from the rock and the Jedi. He sighs when he collides with another floating rock and elects to stand still instead. “Wasn’t sure where you went.”

“Not out there,” the Jedi says, glancing at the rain. “Tell you the truth, I’ve never seen so much water fall from the sky. If you ignore the thunder or the thought that we’re all trapped here until the storm moves on, it’s kind of… peaceful. Really helps with the meditating.”

So the Jedi came from a place with little water, like Tatooine. Din stores that factoid away for… what reason? What is he going to do with this information? It’s not the Jedi he’s hunting but Cheen, and Cheen had been caught.

“Is that what you were doing?” He pokes a smaller piece of rock with his finger and it moves without any resistance. When he lowers his hand, it floats back to its original position. “Doesn’t it tire you?”

“Not really, but it takes years of practice. My master once lifted my X-Wing out of a swamp to make a point. Uh, don’t ask me how it got there.”

“The day after I found Grogu, he raised a mudhorn off the ground when it tried to gore me,” Din offers. “He slept through the rest of the day.”

The Jedi nods. “He hadn’t used the Force in any significant way in years. It can take a lot out of you if you don’t train regularly, or if you let your connection wither away. That exercise you’ve been doing with him, making him use the Force to take a… he called it a toy? Using the Force to take his toy out of your hand. That’s a good first step.”

Something warm curls in Din’s chest much like the first time he coaxed Grogu to take the silver knob from his hand with his powers. “He must be learning something more advanced now.”

“Not really.” The Jedi laughs softly at a memory. “He’s only a young child. I have him move small objects from place to place, one at a time, and meditate in between lessons.”

“That can’t have gone well. Kid doesn’t know to stay put, no matter what I tell him.”

The Jedi shrugs. “It takes time, which I’m sure you didn’t have a lot of. I don’t ask him to sit for as long as I do, but I want him to practice looking inward and feeling the Force all around him… and to find some peace. After everything he’s been through, I want him to learn how to let go of his fears and find stability.”

“By having him sit quietly for more than a few minutes.”

“I can do this for hours,” the Jedi replies. “It helps when I get… frustrated.”

Din looks up from the Jedi at the furious thunderstorm. The sky is dark and heavy with water, and lightning simmers over the clouds. The Jedi could be returning to wherever Grogu, his sister, and the astromech are with the old Jedi books safely in tow. Din could be flying back to Nevarro with Greef’s bounty and the promise of a freezing chamber for his yet-unnamed half-built gunship.

Instead they are trapped here, forced to wait for a clear sky to take off.

“You’re always welcome to join me,” the Jedi says. His eyes are closed and the rocks Din bumped into float back into place.

“I don’t meditate,” Din says and leaves the Jedi to the fourth floor.

* * *

The next day, Din takes the stairs up to the third floor. He switches on his tracker and sees very faint footprints going into the dark depths of the floor and back. He goes back down to the first floor. The Jedi is nowhere to be found and Cheen is sitting up against the wall, looking bored.

“Your Jedi said he needed to ‘meditate’,” Cheen announces.

“He’s not my Jedi.” Din kneels to undo the rope around the Rodian’s ankles. “Get up. We’re taking a walk.”

“Anywhere but out there,” Cheen says, staring at the rain. “I’ve sat through some storms but never seen that much water come down before. What if we get flooded out? I’m not drowning on this miserable wet rock!”

“Then maybe you shouldn’t have come here,” Din says and hauls Cheen over to the stairs. “Walk.”

They go up to the third floor, Din keeping a hand on his holstered pistol while staying behind the Rodian. At the top of the stairs, Din tells Cheen to stop.

“Okay, why are we here?”

Din points down a dim hallway. “What did you find?”

“Piles of rocks. Maybe some clothes, chairs, tables… but no bones. Nobody died here, but we will if the temple collapses on us or we starve to death. What if lightning strikes it and all those rocks bury us-”

“I’m not repeating myself.”

Cheen sighs and tilts his head back. “Those Jedi books your friend is so fond of. Blasted our way into some rooms, took anything that looked interesting and didn’t crumble in our hands, and then went up to the fourth floor. That’s when he found us.”

“You cleared the whole floor?”

Cheen shrugs. “Prairkh, the Trandoshan you killed, said a storm was coming so we just grabbed whatever we found and moved on.”

That means there may be more of these Jedi relics scattered throughout the floor. Din prods Cheen forward, herding him away from the stairs and down the dim hall. “We have all the time now. Let’s take a look.”

“Kriffing poodoo, Mando, are you serious-”

“Carbonite freezing chamber.”

Cheen’s grumbling subsides as he shows the way. The third floor, like the second, is completely sealed off from the elements. Here and there, Din sees traces of life in tattered, faded fabric and brittle bits of wood lying in the rubble, dust, and dirt. They walk through halls and hallways, past collapsed entryways and dividing walls, the remnants of what might have been a dining room. He sees disturbances, too, like streaks in the layers of dirt and dust, debris hastily shoved or kicked aside, and blackened stone where a blaster rifle missed its mark.

“Whatever happened to that asset you stole from a guild client anyway?” Cheen suddenly asks.

“None of your business,” Din says. “Besides, the guild and I settled our debts. It’s not up for debate anymore.”

“Right, right.”

Din suspects Cheen is fishing for information he can use to wiggle out of his situation and decides not to say another word. They continue past the wreckage left behind by Cheen’s careless crew and enter another section of the third floor. The layers of dust are thick and Cheen keeps coughing while walking uncertainly through a large room. While navigating past rubble from a collapsed dividing wall between the hall and someone’s room, Cheen trips over something.

“Dank farrik!” he swears, hopping away from the pile. 

Din spots the corner of a book peeking out of the rubble. He stops to brush aside the debris, revealing a dusty leather-bound tome. His heart leaps; the Jedi will want to see this.

What he doesn’t see is Cheen’s foot swinging in his face, not that it helps the Rodian. The kick knocks Din over but all Cheen manages to achieve are broken bones. He yells and stumbles away, overbalances, and crashes in a cloud of dust. Din shakes sense back into his head, gets up, and stalks over to Cheen.

“And what were you hoping to achieve?” he asks while hauling Cheen onto his feet by his cuffed arms. “You wouldn’t last a day out there with all that rain, and that’s if the Jedi doesn’t get to you first.”

“Hey, at least I tried! Kriff, did I break a toe? _Kriffing_ -”

Din rolls his eyes and drags the limping bounty hunter back to where he dropped the book. He picks it up, shakes off the dust, and tucks it under his arm. “We’re done today.”

They take their time walking back to the stairs. Cheen hobbles and hops, wincing and cursing when he accidentally uses his broken foot as leverage. Somehow, he still finds the energy to chatter.

“So,” Cheen wheezes out. “How did— _kriff_ , ow—how did you and the Jedi meet?”

Again with the probing questions. Din starts wondering if there’s more to the job the Rodian picked up than just raiding a volatile world for Jedi relics. Or perhaps Cheen is just rambling to distract himself from his self-inflicted injury.

“It’s complicated.”

“Uh huh. Does he—does he have a name? Or is he just ‘the Jedi’?”

Din hesitates. When he thinks about it, he doesn’t know the Jedi’s name. He never asked and the Jedi never offered. He wonders why that is. Then again, the Jedi seems to accept “Mando” as Din’s name though he never actually calls Din by any name. He just prompts conversation as soon as they’re within hearing distance of each other.

“Does it matter?”

To his surprise, Cheen doesn’t respond while they slowly descend to the first floor. The Jedi is there now, sitting next to a small smoldering fire. He’s holding a handheld light to one of the Jedi texts, reading intently. He doesn’t look up when Din and Cheen approach.

“Sit,” Din orders the Rodian. He then ties Cheen’s ankles together and searches for a medpac. “We only have a few of these so don’t try anything else before we get off this rock.”

“But I caught you by surprise, didn’t I?” Cheen says cheerfully. “Give me some credit. Ow! Hey!”

Din ignores his complaints while stabilizing the fractured foot with bacta and gauze. Once done, he goes to the Jedi’s side. The Jedi is still reading and doesn’t look up until Din clears his throat. When he does, Din holds out the book.

“Was taking a look around the third floor and Cheen tripped over this. Maybe you should hire him to find more Jedi books for you.”

“I’m not doing business with that sorcerer,” Cheen declares loudly.

“Never mind,” Din says. “Well?”

The book is still in his outstretched hand and the Jedi is starting at it. He seems strangely reluctant to take it. Maybe this book isn’t a Jedi thing after all.

“Guess this one isn’t it-”

The Jedi blinks and shakes his head. “What? No, it is. It’s—I think it’s a journal. The one I’m reading now is a journal belonging to a former Jedi master who lived here. A first-hand account from a time before the Republic. These are all incredibly valuable. I’ll take it.” He does so, carefully, eyes fixed on the dusty unmarked cover. He turns the book over in his hands, a smile blooming on his face. “Thank you for finding this.”

“You’re welcome,” Din says. There’s a lump in the back of his throat. He coughs to clear it.

Strangely enough, the Rodian doesn’t loudly remind them that _he_ found the book, not Din. Cheen is instead staring at the Jedi and his expression is unreadable except for the keen gleam in his large eyes. Din has crossed paths with enough bounty hunters to know the look is that of someone who found their prey. Suspicions roused, he watches the Rodian closely the rest of the day. It turns out to be a waste of time; all Cheen does is complain about his broken foot, the cold, the damp, the rations, the rain, the thunder, the lightning, the rain again, and Din’s threats of freezing him in carbonite.

At this, the Jedi looks sharply at Din but he only shrugs. “Do you want to spend hours on a ship listening to him talk your ears off?”

“Carbonite freezing is dangerous,” the Jedi replies. “Even fatal.”

“Should I tell him about the Mythrol, Mando?” Cheen adds loudly. “Do you know what he says about his left eye? He still can’t see out of it! Oh, and he told me that it was _you_ who got him mixed up in that mess with some-”

“I changed my mind,” the Jedi says. “Definitely put him in carbonite.”

After Cheen’s complaints sputter out and the Rodian turns his back on them, the Jedi leans over and whispers, “Don’t put him in carbonite.”

“You worry about your books,” Din replies, pointing at the one in the Jedi’s hands.

He settles against the wall with his damp cape around his shoulders, facing the Jedi and the small fire with Cheen at the periphery of his visor. If he tilts his head just so, he can see Cheen prodding his bound foot with a scowl. His gaze drifts back to the Jedi, who pays far more attention to words written in the physical pages of a physical book than anyone Din met before. He supposes the tedious work comes with Jedi territory.

Din dozes off. When he comes to, rain is still pouring, the Rodian is snoring, and the Jedi is still reading. He checks his chronometer and frowns.

“Hey.” Din prods the Jedi’s leg with his foot. “Did you eat?”

The Jedi blinks, then rubs his eyes and then his whole face. “How long was I reading?”

“No idea.” He grabs a ration pack from the stash and tosses it to the Jedi.

The Jedi carefully tucks the journal into Cheen’s knapsack along with the other texts. Din watches him eat mindlessly while staring at nowhere and nothing in particular. The Jedi throws the waste into the fire, makes a face before washing away the bland mealy taste with some water, and then looks at Din’s empty hands.

“What about you?”

Din shrugs. He feels hungry but he’s waiting for both the Jedi and Cheen to be fast asleep before eating. The Jedi may have seen his face, but he removed his helmet for Grogu. The Jedi doesn’t count like Miggs doesn’t count.

“I’ll eat later,” he says when the Jedi keeps staring at him.

The Jedi tilts his head to the side, studying Din. “You know, I haven’t seen you take that helmet off even once.”

“You’re noticing this now?”

“You removed it before. I’m just wondering why I haven’t seen you take it off even once since we all got stuck here.”

Din’s mouth dries. All of his imaginary conversations with the Armorer didn’t take into account actually meeting the Jedi again and explaining the intricacies and demands of the creed. Would the Jedi even understand that he and the other two Mandalorians on the Imperial cruiser stand far apart even if their armor resembles each other?

“Kid had never seen my face,” he says slowly. “If it was the last time we’re together, I wanted him to see it before he left.”

The Jedi tilts his head while brushing crumbs off his clothes and thinking on what Din is and isn’t saying. “So I wasn’t supposed to see your face.”

“No.”

“Does it only come off in front of other Mandalorians? Other clan members?”

“That… depends.” 

The entire time they traveled together, Din only took his helmet off when the kid was asleep. Yes, they were a clan of two, but until IG-11 pulled his helmet off he had never exposed his face anywhere where someone else—living or droid—was present and conscious. Then he crossed paths with Bo-Katan, Koska, and Axe, and Grogu began watching him keenly. But the old ways, the old habits, take a very long time to die or transform.

“By creed, my helmet is never to be removed in front of another living being,” Din explains using the easiest words he can think of. “Once it is, I am no longer allowed to wear it again.”

The Jedi looks at him skeptically.

“This is the way. This is what I was taught, what I grew up with. This is all I’ve ever known. Then I met other Mandalorians who didn’t follow the creed, who showed their faces when they weren’t in a fight or on a job. They told me I was a child of the Watch, that my tribe was full of cultists and zealots who followed the ancient ways.”

“And what do these other Mandalorians follow?”

Din wonders if he can explain something he still doesn’t fully comprehend. Bo-Katan told him a history that didn’t line up with what the Tribe imparted. The truth, he supposes, lies somewhere in between. “I know that pacifist Mandalorians ruled Mandalore before the Great Purge, and that not everyone agreed with or accepted their rule. It… makes no sense to me, but not much does. It doesn’t matter now. Mandalore is a cursed world and its people are scattered all over the galaxy. Others can believe whatever they want so long as we both outlive the day.”

But that’s not exactly true, is it? Bo-Katan didn’t mince words regarding her feelings about the covert, the Tribe, the Watch that saved him at Aq Vetina. He hated how she looked at him, how the condescension dripped from her smile as she explained where he and his covert fit into the story of Mandalore. He hated how small and lonely she made him feel.

“I’m not all that familiar with Mandalore or Mandalorians,” the Jedi admits, his warm, easy voice cutting through Din’s spiraling thoughts. “I ran into one once, I think. A bounty hunter who was looking for me and went after my friends.”

Din finds that hard to believe. “How did you survive?”

The Jedi grimaces. “Luck.”

He nods. “That’s fair.”

“I’m not sure what his creed was, but I never saw his face.” The Jedi tilts his head the other way while studying Din, or his helmet. It’s hard to tell. “You know, it sounds like your creed is all about protecting you from danger. That’s why you don’t remove your helmet in front of just anyone. If no one sees your face, then they can’t track you or your clan down.”

“That is a reason, yes.”

They sit in silence for a time, unsure of what else to say. The downpour fills in that silence, and then the Jedi suddenly and dramatically stifles a yawn.

“Oh, I’m beat,” he mumbles. “This Jedi master takes a whole page to say something that only needs one or two sentences. Should have my sister go through these and summarize them. She was always better at reading. Anyway, I’m getting some sleep. You have the first watch, right?”

The Jedi moves with far too much grace and control to be as exhausted as he claims to be. Din watches him go to the other side of the hall and curl up under his black cloak, back to the fire, to Din. It takes a long moment for Din to realize exactly what the Jedi is doing, and the realization makes something thump in his chest. He glances at Cheen, who is still fast asleep and occasionally letting out a mumbling snore. He is safe for now. He can remove his helmet and he does so slowly. He sets it aside and drags a hand through his unruly damp dark hair. A cool breeze sweeps through the hall, stirring up the low fire and brushing against his hot face while he drinks from his canteen and opens a ration pack.

The next day, Din splits his time between searching the third floor for anything of interest and keeping an eye on the restless Rodian. He asks Cheen throughout the day about his clients but Cheen is as tight-lipped about them as Din is about his time on the run from the guild. Eventually, Cheen declares he’s tired of Din’s shoddy interrogation tactics and turns away, refusing to acknowledge him. Shaking his head, Din goes back up to the third floor to sweep through another set of rooms. He comes up empty minus a few tattered rags and bits of wood that he feeds to their small fire.

“Why even bother?” Cheen later asks while picking apart his ration. “Do you even read?”

He doesn’t grace the Rodian with an answer, mostly because Cheen doesn’t need to know anything about Grogu and partially because he has little else to do. A very small part of him remembers the Jedi’s smile when Din gave him the journal.

Din completely forgets about his conversation with the Jedi until long after dark. He’d only seen the Jedi twice all day and both times the Jedi is reading from one of the journals, brow furrowed in deep concentration while he tries to make sense of the old master’s handwriting. Right now, the Jedi is nowhere to be seen but Din doesn’t think about it. He starts cleaning his blaster pistol for the fourth time today, concentrating on the smallest grooves and holes, and then the Jedi appears from the shadows, cowl over his head. His boots and trousers are soaked to the knees but the rest of him is as dry as dust.

He stares at the Jedi from head to toe, trying to make sense of it.

“I took a walk around the temple grounds,” the Jedi explains. When he notices Din is still looking, he adds, “I used the Force.”

Din doesn’t understand what that means but he’s figured that he probably never will. Resigned to that fact of life, he grabs a ration pack and tosses it at the Jedi. To his surprise, the Jedi raises a hand and stops it in midair. He floats it back over to Din and lets it drop in his lap, then lifts another pack from their shrinking stash.

“I was scouting. The whole town’s flooded and the current is strong. Could knock you over if you slip,” the Jedi says while sitting cross-legged in front of Din. He peers around Din at Cheen, who’s snoring with his broken foot propped up on a rolled-up coat. “Only reason why the temple hasn’t flooded yet is because it’s on higher ground. I’d go out to my X-Wing to grab my emergency supplies but I landed it a bit far from here.”

“We still have enough for several days,” Din says. He picks up his ration and sets it aside for later. Then, “What are you doing?”

The Jedi is tearing off the ends of his cloak. He holds up a long strip of black cloth. “I need a blindfold.”

Din is suddenly aware of how loudly his heart beats. It pummels his chest and squeezes the air out, making it hard to breathe. Or he’s just imagining things. He swallows and says, “Why?”

The Jedi stares at him like he’s a moof-milker. “You said no living being besides Grogu should see your face. If I’m blindfolded, you can take your helmet off and I won’t have to eat by myself. Meals are communal things, you know, and a way to stay sane while stuck inside a temple with a talkative Rodian and a bunch of old books written by very boring Jedi masters.”

Before Din can protest—though he doesn’t know what he’s protesting since the Jedi’s logic is sound—he covers his eyes with the cloth strip and ties it behind his head. Then, with eerie precision, he picks up his ration pack and opens it without feeling around like any other suddenly sightless person would.

“Are you sure you can’t see?” Din asks skeptically, though something light and bubbly seems to fill him up. It feels like possibility, like hope.

“I can sense my surroundings using the Force but it’s not the same as seeing with my eyes. Go on. You must be starving after spending hours dealing with him.”

“You have no idea.”

Din waits a minute, two minutes, three, before slowly removing his helmet. He watches the Jedi carefully but the other man doesn’t react. It’s only when Din sets the helmet down beside him that the Jedi stops eating and smiles.

“See? Now I won’t feel awkward eating by myself while one person is snoring and the other person is staring.”

His glee is infectious because Din realizes he’s smiling, too, as he opens his ration. They don’t speak while eating but he’s used to the silence; he suspects the Jedi isn’t but the Jedi doesn’t say anything either. He listens for any funny noises coming from the Rodian behind him but all he hears is rain and thunder and the crackling of the small fire. He starts to relax as he eats, though he still finishes much more quickly than the Jedi does.

Cheen suddenly grumbles and rolls over onto his other side. Din grabs his helmet but the Jedi holds up a hand. “He’s still asleep.”

Din can’t make himself peel his fingers off the helmet. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure. You’re all right. You’re safe.”

Safe. That’s not a word anyone used to reassure Din since he was rescued from the ruins of Aq Vetina. Yes, he was safe once he was taken in as a foundling but Mandalorians had never been truly safe, especially after the Great Purge. So why does it sound so different coming from the Jedi? He can almost believe the Jedi’s reassurances. No, he wants to believe them because the Jedi gave no reason to doubt his word.

“Thank you,” he slowly says and lifts his hand from the helmet.

He just doesn’t know what to make of the suddenly shy smile on the Jedi’s face and the quieter, but no less earnest, “You’re welcome.”


	3. The Dance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had a thought about having a posting schedule of some kind. What a thought that was.
> 
> Thank you, thank you, thank you for all of your kind and thoughtful comments. They let me know I'm on the right track. 
> 
> This chapter went a bit wild during revisions so... here goes nothing.

The fourth floor consists of the ritual room and nothing else. Din watches the Jedi meditate, a floating silhouette of serene power highlighted by the occasional flash of lightning. One such strike illuminates the Jedi’s face. He’s watching Din. Unnerved, Din turns and goes back to the stairs. Yesterday’s search of the last rooms, corridors, and piles of rubble on the third floor yielded nothing. The only way now is up.

The fifth floor is dark and cold and eerily silent. He treads lightly yet his boots still make too much noise as he scans the hallway. As with the other floors, he sees traces of life everywhere; tattered fabric still hangs from the walls while a wooden bench sits next to a rusted brazier full of ashes and dust. The fifth floor is smaller than the others and everything is crammed closer together, including the main corridor. He cautiously walks down it, scanning his surroundings. There are entryways on either side, some intact but leading to dark empty rooms and others that had collapsed, covering the floors with debris. He notes those for later excavation.

After some twenty minutes of cautious movement, he finds something worthwhile. A doorway had collapsed but there’s a gap large enough for him to squeeze through. He grimaces as beskar scrapes along gray stone but stumbles out the other side with nary a scratch on his armor. He stands in total darkness and takes a handheld light out of his belt to affix to his helmet. He looks around, stepping on what might’ve been a woven rug, and pushes aside piles of stone, wood, and fabric with his foot. He feels along the walls with his hands, searching for shelves and secrets, and finds a partially collapsed alcove. Under the debris is a stack of texts.

Din smiles.

Excitement fades when he counts eight texts and only three of them haven’t been eaten away by time or insects. Three texts are better than none, however, so he shakes the dust off of them, tucks them under his arm, and squeezes back out into the hall. He stumbles right into the Jedi, who nearly drops his own light.

“Whoa!” The Jedi steadies him, gripping his upper arms tightly. “What were you doing in… are those what I think they are?”

“You tell me,” Din says. He holds a text out to the Jedi, who immediately lets him go to take it.

“I think it is,” the Jedi says. Even in the dim light, his eyes are bright. “How many did you find?”

“Three. There’s more back there but it looks like the bugs got to them first.”

“Well, three are better than none,” the Jedi says. He opens it and flips through the pages, scanning the contents. They’re mostly block of letters but there are also diagrams and sketches of things Din has no context for. They certainly mean something to the Jedi because he snaps it shut and laughs quietly. And then coughs from the clouds of fine dust rising from the pages. “This is incredible. I’ve seen similar symbols on the holocrons I recovered from the… you wouldn’t know what I’m talking about.”

“Probably not.”

The Jedi sighs and takes the other two books from Din. “These might be able to help me decipher other relics that I can’t figure out. The knowledge I unlock will help Grogu and the new Jedi Order, so thank you.”

Din shrugs, becoming increasingly uneasy with the praise, with the Jedi’s bright eyes and earnest smile. He shifts back on his feet, resisting the urge to tug at the collar of his cape. “Cheen said his men never got this far so I thought I’d take a look.”

“Thank goodness. They wouldn’t know what to look for.”

“I’m just grabbing anything that looks like a book,” Din admits.

The Jedi laughs. “Then I’d better come with you.”

They venture down the hall to the next room. Din starts pulling away at the piles of stone blocking the way inside but stops when rocks start lifting and floating away. He looks over his shoulder at the Jedi, who’s gesturing with his right hand.

“Could’ve used your powers earlier,” Din says.

“It’s not much,” the Jedi replies. “I don’t want to dislodge the wrong thing and bring the ceiling down on our heads. At least you’re wearing beskar.”

“Not that interested in risking it,” Din says and resumes removing the rubble by hand.

The only thing of note that they find in the room is a stone carving on a desk. The books the Jedi unearths are of no use; while the leather and wood covers are intact, the pages had been torn or eaten away. Whatever is left is barely legible; the Jedi holds a moth-eaten page up to the light but after a few seconds, he shakes his head and sets it on the table next to the stone carving. This one he picks up to take a closer look.

“I think it’s supposed to be a bird,” he muses. He starts setting it down, then has second thoughts and pockets it. “Grogu might like it.”

Outside, Din shakes the dust off of his cloak and heads to the next doorway. The Jedi is slow to follow, seemingly distracted by a thought or several. He suddenly stops and turns around. “I think your Rodian friend hurt himself again.”

“He’s not my friend,” Din says with a sigh. “What’s he done now?”

They go back to the stairs and hurry down to the bottom. Din hears Cheen cursing as he jumps down the last several steps and enters the hall. The Rodian is on his side near Din’s pile of salvaged weapons. There is a blast mark on the wall on the other side and a long searing burn on Cheen’s brown trouser leg. Behind Cheen is a blaster pistol, and the sequence of events becomes clear. The weapon suddenly wiggles and slides across the floor, then levitates and floats over to Din. He takes it and glances at the Jedi before striding over to the Rodian.

“What did you do this time?” he asks.

Cheen glowers at him. “Tried to sneak a pistol into my pants.”

“And nearly shot your leg off. I suggest you stop trying to get away, because you won’t.”

Cheen says nothing. With another sigh. Din grabs the Rodian by the arm, pulls him to his feet, and herds him back across the hall. He dumps Cheen next to the fire. “Sit. Need to waste another medpac on this.”

“What else do I have, Mando? I’m stuck here with a broken foot, bored out of my kriffing mind. The only thing I get to look forward to is talking my way out of whatever Karga's lined up for me. You get to go wandering around the damn temple with your Jedi friend-”

“He’s not my friend. I told you, Karga never said _how_ I should bring you in. All he cares is that you show up on Nevarro alive.”

“See? This is why I’m making a break for freedom. And if I outrun you? That would get me more clients.”

“You have no clients,” Din reminds him. “You have the guild to answer to. You’re done hunting.”

“So are you,” Cheen grumbles. “I’m not the only one stuck here. Ow! Be gentle. I have a broken foot, remember?”

Din rolls his eyes while applying bacta and binding the raw burns on the Rodian’s leg. Afterward, he goes through the pile of weapons he took off of Cheen’s dead crew and disassembles every one of them. Well, except for a pistol. It’s a weathered piece, well-made and carefully maintained through the years. This one he brings over to the Jedi, who’s sitting with his back to Din and Cheen. He's reading one of the newly recovered texts.

“Here,” Din says, holding out the pistol. “You might need this.”

The Jedi stares at it. “I’m a Jedi. And I already have one.”

“I know. It looks like something you fished out of a sarlacc’s stomach. This one’s been cared for. It’s reliable. Might come in handy.”

The Jedi looks doubtful but he eventually takes it. He sets it aside, though, and continues reading. It feels like a slight, though Din doesn’t know why. He shakes off the feeling and leaves the Jedi be. He looks at the staircase and considers going back up to the fifth floor but it seems the moment’s passed. If he’s being honest with himself, he feels tired. The endless rain, the gloomy days and jet-black nights, all wear on his mind. 

Din falls asleep while watching the low fire. He dreams in fits and starts, memories that don’t linger, fear and frustration that dries his throat and leaves a bitter taste. When he wakes, his limbs ache, protesting his slumped posture. He groans and grumbles while stretching them, then checks his chronometer. It’s well and truly night. He twitches when lightning flashes, followed by the rolling boom of thunder.

“Bad dreams?” the Jedi asks. He’s still awake and sitting by the fire, watching the curtains of rain shrouding the temple’s entryway. “I, uh, felt a disturbance.”

Din stares at him. “I don’t have any powers.”

“The Force is in all living things. If I concentrate, I can feel it in every plant and tree in the forest out there. I can feel it in every creature that lives there. And I can sense it in those around me. How else did I know Cheen hurt himself?”

Din doesn’t like what he’s hearing. “So you can feel someone’s pain. Can you read minds?”

“We can… nudge them in certain directions, but I don’t do that unless I have no other choice,” the Jedi replies. “I prefer to give people a chance.”

This sounds true to the Jedi so Din accepts his explanation with a nod. “Is that what you’ll teach the kid?”

“Of course. I think it’s important to know what you can and can’t do, and that just because you can do something doesn’t always mean you should.”

Din huffs and leans back against the wall, folding his arms over his chest. “That’s good.”

The Jedi hums but doesn’t say anything. Instead, after a minute or two of silence, he gets up and goes to the other side of the hall. He turns his back on Din and a snoring Cheen, pulls his cloak around his shoulders, and opens a Jedi text to read by handheld light. Confused by this continued unexplained slight, Din turns his attention to the low fire. He stares at the warm glow until he nods off, dreaming of Tatooine’s relentless heat.

* * *

Din is the first one awake. Unfortunately, the storm had not gone away during the night. Thunder rumbles in the distance while he stirs the embers of the small fire and coaxes it back to life with brittle wood he found elsewhere in the temple. He eats cautiously and quickly, watching the slumbering Jedi and the nearby Rodian for any signs of wakefulness. When Cheen huffs and grumbles under his breath, Din stops eating and pulls the helmet over his head. 

After, he walks to the other end of the hall. The entrance is further away from their makeshift camp so no one would be able to see him pull his helmet off and lean out to let the rain wash over his head. It’s terribly cold and he’s gasping as water washes away dirt and grime and sleep. He steps back inside the temple, wipes his face with his cape, and puts the helmet back on. He turns around, sees that the others are still asleep, and goes to the stairs to begin his climb.

The fifth floor is cold and dark, but he sees a shred of fabric slide across the floor and realizes that air is getting in somewhere, somehow. Well, he shouldn’t be surprised; this structure is very old, and the thunderstorms have had time to batter at the stone walls. It does mean everything on this floor is compromised and he wonders if he’ll find anything left that’s still intact. 

He goes looking anyway.

An hour, maybe two, passes before Din has company. He’d searched several rooms without success and is poking at the crevices of what looks like a sitting area when he hears careful footfalls in the shadows. He turns and the light affixed to his helmet shines on the Jedi.

“Thought you’d be here,” the Jedi says. He looks oddly tense, shoulders stiff and smile stilted. 

Did the Jedi think he’d disappear without another word? And without dragging Cheen along? “Where else would I be?”

“Oh. Well, I don’t know. Anywhere else, I guess.” The Jedi rubs the back of his head. “You ever wake up from a dream and wonder if you were dreaming at all?”

“That depends.” 

Din pushes aside debris with his foot and finds what he’s really looking for—a gap in the wall where stone had crumbled away. Cold damp wind whistles through it. He shoves the rubble back into place, sealing it as best as he can. Having found nothing else in the sitting area, he moves down the hallway, searching for the next room. The Jedi follows.

“Sometimes I dream I’m the only one left,” the Jedi says. “The last of the Jedi. There will always be Force-sensitive people but after everything the Empire did to erase the Jedi from memory, I sometimes wonder if the Jedi Order will die with me. I barely know it myself and I have to restore it.”

“Why?” Din asks. He peers into a room and scans it for anything of interest. He finds the remains of a cot, a stool, and a table, and notes them all to salvage later for fuel. A thick layer of dust covers the otherwise empty stone shelves. He moves on. “Why is it your responsibility?”

“Who else is there?” the Jedi replies. “Who else will be around to teach Force-sensitive beings how to wield the Force? Why else did I answer Grogu’s call?”

Din wonders what the Jedi is trying to say. His words come uncomfortably close to the trouble that sits at the back of Din’s mind and hangs from his belt. Who else won the Darksaber and is now in the position to reunite the people of Mandalore?

“Because you’re the only one left who can,” he says, thinking about Ahsoka’s refusal to take Grogu in. Her eyes spoke of a different purpose as she told him where to go next. That way led to Moff Gideon, who had his own reasons to take Grogu, and the Jedi. “That troubles you.”

The Jedi smiles uncertainly. “How I restore the Jedi Order depends on how I decide to teach him. You… spoke of being a foundling, someone who lost their parents and was taken in by Mandalorians. The Jedi, they do something similar. They take Force-sensitive children to their temples to raise and train in the ways of the Jedi. They do this when the children are very young. It… helps teach them not to form strong attachments, which can make them vulnerable to their darker impulses.”

A chill shivers down Din’s spine. Ahsoka’s misgivings about Grogu resurface; she kept insisting that Grogu’s attachment to him made the kid too dangerous to train. She wouldn’t take Grogu in. She also said Grogu was already in training at a Jedi temple when the Republic fell; wouldn’t the kid already know what to do about these attachments?

Din flexes his hands and slowly says, “What’s your point?”

“I know of a Jedi Knight who was taken in by the Order at an older age than is typical,” the Jedi says. He stops, swallows hard, and then continues. “He had a hard life before the Jedi found him and when they took him to Coruscant, he had to leave his mother behind. People don’t… forget that sort of thing. Your past is a part of you, it helps define who you are. And it defined him, despite everything his masters taught him about letting go of his… attachments.”

This sounds eerily similar to the very short story Ahsoka told him. Perhaps the Jedi share stories of fallen knights as parables for their students. But what does this mean for Grogu?

“I was told Grogu had a strong attachment to me. What does that mean for him?”

The Jedi sighs and looks up at the ceiling. “Nothing, I hope, but one can’t be too careful. I always wondered what might’ve been if the Order paid more attention to the Jedi Knight. He allowed his attachments to cloud his judgment. They made him fearful, angry, and desperate, but he had no one to turn to, no one to help him. They were too busy fighting in the Clone Wars. In the end, he turned on the Order and helped destroy it.”

Din stops scanning an empty room and turns to the Jedi. “What? The Clone Wars? You’re telling me this happened recently? That the kid was alive at the same time as the Jedi Knight?”

The Jedi nods. “Yes. He’d been through more than any child should. He watched his whole world fall. Imagine spending the next decades living in fear of being discovered by the Empire. He was terrified, distrusting, maybe even angry… and then you came along.”

“Me? I… he was a bounty,” Din says awkwardly, not at all prepared for the sudden turn in this conversation. “I was only doing my job.”

“You handed him over to a client who worked for the Empire,” the Jedi continues. “And then you took him back. You put your life on the line for him. Imagine what that meant to him. Why wouldn’t he grow attached?”

“But you said-”

“I know. But you let him choose his future. You showed him how to let go. In the old days, that would be it but those days are gone and I don’t want them to come back. I want him to keep his connection to you. I think it’ll help him become more confident in his abilities and in himself. “

Din stares at him.

“What I’m saying is, you don’t have to stay away just because he’s with his kind now. He’s part of your clan, isn’t he? Once the storm clears up, I can give you our coordinates. You can come see him whenever you want.”

He doesn’t know what to say. There’s a lump in the back of his throat. His eyes are too hot and he can’t do anything without taking his helmet off. He nods mutely and walks to the next room, keeping his breathing as even as possible. Frayed fabric hangs from the top, suggesting woven curtains were used in lieu of actual doors; he pushes them aside while stepping into the dark. The light on his helmet illuminates the room but he doesn’t see anything. He squeezes his eyes shut and just breathes.

When he leaves the room, the Jedi is standing nearby, looking elsewhere. He only turns around when Din says, “There wasn’t anything worth a credit in there.”

They finally find something worthwhile in the fourth room they search together. Din pulls down a bundle from a crevice near the ceiling and carries it out into the hallway. The Jedi pulls away the threadbare cloth, revealing two texts with wooden covers and yellowing pages. 

“These will do,” the Jedi breathes, eyes alight with excitement.

Din realizes he’s staring at the Jedi’s bright expression but the Jedi wouldn’t know. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. 

“Is something wrong?”

He shakes his head. “No. I just… woke up too early. Not that it makes a difference.”

“I know what you mean,” the Jedi says while he carefully wraps up the two texts in the faded cloth. “I woke up later than I usually do. Your Rodian friend was complaining about his leg so I had to use another medpac on him.”

Din sighs. “He’s not my friend.”

The Jedi doesn’t look at him. “Am I yours?”

That makes him pause. If the Jedi had asked the day after the storm began, he would’ve said, “No.” He knew nothing about the Jedi except for the promise he made to protect and train Grogu. But they’ve been trapped in the temple for seven days now. Din has told the nameless Jedi far more about himself than he ever would with a stranger. Though, is the Jedi really a stranger if he's also Grogu's guardian? Is the Jedi a stranger when he knows Din's face, even though Din convinced himself that it doesn’t count? 

If they cross paths again, will the Jedi remain a stranger to him?

“Maybe,” Din says before the silence drags on for too long. "Yes." 

The Jedi offers a tentative smile. “I’m glad. I overheard you tell your Rodian—I mean, I heard you tell Cheen something else and I wasn’t sure.”

“What?” 

Din tries to recall his last conversation with Cheen, which was about stale canteen water. No, that was a different day. He was scolding the Rodian yesterday about his escape attempt which resulted in a blaster burn and wasted medpacs. The Jedi wasn't involved though he was nearby when Cheen groused that he had nothing to do while Din kept busy searching the temple with— _oh_. 

“Oh. I… wasn’t thinking when I said that. Sorry.”

The Jedi laughs. “He has a talent for getting on everyone’s nerves, doesn’t he?”

“Reason why the guild sent me after him.”

They walk back to the stairs. The Jedi stops at the fourth floor and turns to Din. “I’ll be here for a while. If you need a break from dealing with Cheen….”

Din stares ahead at the ritual room and the gray sheets of rain falling just beyond the ledge. “I don’t meditate.”

He continues down to the first floor alone, where Cheen is singing under his breath while throwing pebbles as far as he can with his cuffed hands. Cheen doesn’t look at him while he dusts off his cape and sits down against the wall facing the stairs.

“Empty-handed today, Mando?” Cheen calls out mockingly.

Perhaps he is but he doesn’t feel like he wasted his time. He leans back, arms folded over his beskar-plated vest, and simply says, “No.”

* * *

The Jedi returns hours later with the texts in his arms and a sober expression. He ignores Cheen and goes straight to Din, who’s sitting cross-legged next to the small fire and cleaning his beskar staff. Din looks up when the Jedi sits heavily and sets aside the texts.

“How many books are there?” Cheen wonders loudly. “Kriff, I could’ve been rich.”

Din rolls his eyes. “Not now.” He then leans forward. “What is it?”

The Jedi shrugs and drags a hand through his light hair. It’s tousled like he’d been doing it constantly. “They’re journals, but not about life in this town or temple. They’re about the storms.”

“What?”’

The Jedi touches the cover of one of the journals, tracing its wooden edge. “These were written not long after the storms started. They're all about the floods, the drownings, the dying crops, ships being struck by lightning when they tried to leave. Whoever wrote these talked about the sickness that swept through the town and temple because everything was too wet and too cold and nobody had enough to eat. This one… they didn’t finish writing this one. The last thing they wrote was that they’d been coughing for weeks and it was hard writing the next words on the page.”

Din wonders if that’s why the two texts were hidden away so carefully. Did the being behind them hope that one day, someone would come to Vos-3 and find these records of the storms that drove its people away?

“Are you keeping them?” he asks.

“Yes, of course,” the Jedi replies. “They have nothing for me but I’ll give them to my sister. Someone wrote these to remember what happened here. We should archive them so that we can remember, too.”

Din nods but the Rodian huffs at the thought. “Don’t see why they’re worth the effort. Who’d actually care what happened here?”

“I’d care,” the Jedi says, scowling at Cheen. “If even one person remembers, then that’ll be enough.”

The Rodian shrugs and resumes throwing pebbles across the hall. “Whatever.”

Din sighs while leaning his staff against the wall. He doesn’t need any Force powers to know that the Jedi’s patience is fraying as much as Din’s is. Cheen is increasingly irate and harsh, and will only get worse. They’re all trapped here, not knowing when the storm will let up. He supposes it’s a race now to see who snaps first. 

The Jedi shifts in his seat. Something is on his mind and Din can’t help noticing that his gaze keeps lingering on the silver staff.

“You know,” the Jedi slowly says, “Grogu wouldn’t tell me how he knows this but that staff, it’s pure beskar?”

“Yes.”

There’s an expression on the Jedi’s face that can only be described as cheeky. “How do you feel about sparring?”

Even Cheen sits up. Din tilts his head, considering. After days of listening to or watching the thunderstorm, wandering around the temple, eating bland rations, and trying to keep Cheen from making a fool of himself, he could do with trying something different. Sparring can take up his time in new and interesting ways. He also never fought a Jedi of this caliber before and could use the experience.

“What are the rules?”

The Jedi shrugs but he’s downright gleeful as he says, “Only use the weapons on hand. Oh, and no killing anyone. Obviously. No serious injuries, either. I think we only have three medpacs left, no thanks to Cheen.”

“Hey!” the Rodian protests. Then, “Did you just call me by my name?”

“What about your powers?”

The Jedi shakes his head. “Not today.”

That sounds fair. “Fine.”

The Jedi leaps to his feet gracefully. He brims with bridled energy, clearly eager to let loose. Din follows him a short distance from their makeshift camp, staff in hand; he won’t deny that his heart is starting to race, anticipating a break from the monotony of the past several days.

The Jedi turns and shrugs off his cloak, casting it aside with his powers. He draws out his lightsaber. The green blade glows vividly in the dark and hums, vibrating the air.

The Rodian sputters. “What is that? Is that a laser sword? He had one the whole time?”

“And he wouldn’t have needed it to beat you,” Din says. He hefts the beskar in his hands. “Just so you know, I prefer guns.”

“You do all right with that staff.” The Jedi’s gaze flickers to the hilt at Din’s belt. “Can’t say the same about the Darksaber.”

“I’m not using it,” he says, though he has to wonder. What happens when the Darksaber clashes with the Jedi’s green lightsaber? What happens if Din _loses_? “Not today, anyway.”

“That’s fair,” the Jedi says and shifts into a defensive stance. 

Most of Din’s opponents fight to win. Din just has to keep up and outsmart them to gain the upper hand. The Jedi, from what little Din had seen from the security feeds, seems to prefer deflection and evasion; he was never where Cheen’s Devaronian crewmate expected him to be, and that’s something Din keeps in mind as his beskar staff collides with the lightsaber. 

Sparks fly as the Jedi allows the lightsaber to drop, making his staff slide downward. Din quickly turns his shoulder to block what would be a disabling blow and the lightsaber collides with his beskar pauldron. The Jedi leaps back when he thrusts the staff forward and retreats across the hall, blocking and deflecting every one of his strikes. The beskar vibrates every time it collides with the lightsaber’s glowing blade.

“Do all Mandalorians wear beskar?” the Jedi asks while parrying another blow.

“I don’t know.” He blocks the lightsaber when it swings at his side. “Empire took most of the beskar when they purged Mandalore. I-” He deflects another strike trying to slip past his defenses. “I got mine as a reward for bringing the kid to them.”

The Jedi’s smile is grim as he starts pushing Din back across the hall. “And then you took him, too. Good. They shouldn’t be in Imperial hands.”

Din learns very quickly that the Jedi’s evasive tactics also lend him a kind of fluidity and flexibility that mimics water. He’s never quite where he’s supposed to be, already sliding away to strike from another angle. He’ll wear down his opponents if he hasn’t already defeated them, so Din tries to adapt. He deflects another strike but keeps contact with the lightsaber; with a deft twist of the staff, he forces the Jedi to pivot to hold onto the blade and then pushes forward. The Jedi makes a mistake stepping back rather than to the side, and he presses his advantage. He blocks the lightsaber with his left vambrace and presses the beskar staff against the Jedi’s throat.

The Jedi stares at him with wild, startled eyes. His face is flushed from the exercise and his hair a tousled mess; he breathes harshly and swallows hard against the beskar staff before speaking.

“You win.”

The lightsaber draws back into its hilt but Din is slow to pull back. He can’t stop staring and he doesn’t know why.

Their lone audience groans loudly. “Oh come on, Jedi! Mando can’t be better than you.”

The Jedi glances at Cheen while slipping out of Din’s reach. “That’s just the first round. I’ll do better next time.”

Din shakes his head and lowers the beskar staff. “If you used your powers, you would’ve won.”

“I said I wouldn’t,” the Jedi reminds him. He hooks the hilt onto his belt, then rolls his shoulders. “Wow, haven’t had to fight like that in a while.”

“You took out a whole platoon of dark troopers.”

“That’s different. I haven’t had many chances to fight someone in single combat. Mostly they try to shoot me, or bomb me. And they don’t have any beskar on them.” The Jedi rubs his right shoulder. “It’s nice having a challenge for once.”

Din pretends he’s not aching all over, that his limbs aren’t on fire or that he desperately wants to take his helmet off. Instead he turns to the stairs. “I’ll be right back.”

The Jedi nods like he already knows where Din is going and pats him on the arm before turning away.

On the fourth floor, Din leans his staff against one of the pillars and slowly pulls his helmet off. The air is even colder and his breaths come out in white clouds. He pulls off his gloves and holds his right hand out to catch rainwater to drink. He then leans out to let the rain wash away the sweat and heat. All that’s left is the thumping in his chest, the tumultuous pace of his heart. He lets the water drip from his face as he stares out at the fog rising from the surrounding forest. Down below, torrents of brownish water rush through the abandoned town, a treacherous sight and warning to stay in place. And above them all is the heavy gray sky that grows darker as the planet tilts away from its star. 

When his heart beats as slowly as his breathing, he pulls his helmet back on and goes back down to the first floor. The Jedi and Cheen are sitting near the fire; Cheen keeps trying to give him pointers for maiming and even killing Din with the laser sword, all of which the Jedi ignores in favor of reading one of the other texts they pulled from the fifth floor. The Jedi looks as though he also doused himself in rain to cool off; when he looks up at Din, his face is still flush from the cold and his hair is damp. His cloak is nowhere in sight.

“There you are,” the Jedi says, smiling.

Din doesn’t know what to make of the remark or the smile on the Jedi’s face. He doesn’t know why his heart is beating so loudly again. He looks elsewhere and his gaze settles on the fire sputtering on what looks like damp branches and brittle wood chips. 

“Aren’t you cold?” he asks while setting his beskar staff down somewhere far from Cheen. “Where’s your cloak?”

“Uh….” The Jedi looks around and then down the hall. “Guess I dropped it somewhere over there.”

Sighing, Din walks past a suddenly very silent and watchful Cheen to the black cloak and shakes off the dirt. He feels the Rodian’s eyes following him as he goes back to the Jedi and holds it out. The Jedi takes it with a sheepish look and pulls it around his shoulders.

“Let’s do this again tomorrow,” he says. “I don’t get many chances and there’s not much else to do.”

Din slowly sits down against the wall. “Really?”

The Jedi shrugs. “Do you have any better ideas?”

The only thing awaiting him tomorrow is the rest of the fifth floor and if he’s being honest, he doesn’t want to start and end his day there. “No. Fine, we’ll go again tomorrow.”

Pleased, the Jedi resumes reading. Din settles against the wall, letting the day catch up to him. He watches the Jedi go through the text, expression alternating between curiosity and confusion as he turns each page. The fire is low and in constant danger of flickering out, and Din’s helmet filters everything, but it looks as though the Jedi is glowing in the warm firelight. He is strangely soothing to watch and Din feels himself being lulled into sleep. The hall slowly fills with the sounds of rain and thunder, and then Din realizes he still hasn’t heard anything coming from the Rodian. He tilts his head to see Cheen looking at them.

“Kriff me,” Cheen mutters under his breath and turns away from them. “Why did I take this kriffing job….”

* * *

They spar in the morning before anyone is fully awake, beskar and lightsaber colliding again and again as Din tries to keep his footing. The Jedi is proving a much tougher opponent than yesterday even if he looks like he hadn’t slept more than a few hours. The match ends with the Jedi knocking his staff out of his hands and holding him at swordpoint. The lightsaber is a little too warm against the side of his neck and Din surrenders. 

The Jedi drinks from one of the canteens and hands it over to Din. “Again?”

Din lifts the bottom of his helmet to drink and he realizes he’s smiling. “Sure.”

The second round starts with the Jedi saying, “I want to use the Force, but only if you have something besides the staff.”

His gaze falls on the Darksaber but Din holds up his left vambrace. “I have flamethrowers.”

“Really?”

Once they establish the ground rules and Din’s staff collides with the lightsaber, he starts searching for a tic, a trigger, a clue that the Jedi is going to use his Force powers. That proves to be a mistake; while looking for that clue, the Jedi easily evades his attack and nearly disarms him, then _pushes_ Din back without touching him. Something Din can’t see slams into him and he slides several feet across the floor.

“Dank farrik!” Cheen yelps somewhere behind him. “What was that?”

Din finds his footing again, hefts his staff, and waits for the Jedi to strike. “Just don’t lift me off the floor.”

The Jedi nods and goes on the offensive, trying to disarm or slip past Din’s defenses. Din twists and parries, looking for the moment the Jedi uses his powers again. He doesn’t see it and the Jedi pulls his feet out from under him. He falls but not gracelessly; he rolls onto his stomach, raises his right arm, and activates his flamethrower. Fire bursts and throws back the dark, making both the Jedi and Cheen flinch. Din leaps to his feet, blocks the lightsaber with his right forearm, and unleashes fire with his left vambrace. The Jedi recoils and Din rams him into the wall. The lightsaber hums at the back of Din’s neck, ready to slide under his helmet if the Jedi wishes it.

“You have flamethrowers on both arms,” the Jedi says. His short, harsh breaths fog the visor. “Should’ve expected that.”

“No,” Din replies. “You didn’t expect the light.”

The Jedi thinks about it for a few seconds. “You’re right. I didn’t expect it to be so bright. Draw?”

“Sure.” He starts pulling back but stops when the heat at the back of his neck intensifies. “You mind?”

“What? Oh.” The Jedi withdraws the lightsaber blade and drops his arm. He leans back against the wall and exhales loudly, dragging his left hand down his face. “Half expected you to burn my face off.”

“I did warn you,” Din says while stepping back. He frowns, eyes narrowing while he scans for any signs of injury on the Jedi. “Did I hurt you?”

“No, I’m fine. I’m all right.” The Jedi flashes a smile to prove it. “What else are you armed with?”

Din tilts his head. “I don’t know if I should tell you. That would be cheating.”

The Jedi looks like he might protest but instead he nods. “Guess I’ll find out the next time.”

“Next time,” Din echoes. “Sure.”

When Din returns from the fourth floor, face and head damp under the helmet, the Jedi is reading another text and determinedly ignoring Cheen’s questions about his powers and laser sword. As soon as he reaches them, the Jedi jumps to his feet and tucks the text under his arm.

“I’m going to meditate for a while,” he says. “See you on the fifth floor?”

Din nods and watches the Jedi go up the stone stairs without a backwards glance. He then looks at the Rodian suspiciously. For his part, Cheen is giving Din an equally strange look.

“What did you say to him?” Din asks.

“Me? I was just asking questions! I mean, you saw what he did. Don’t tell me you’ve never seen anything like that, and I don’t mean him lifting Fev off the ground that one time.” Cheen stops, has a thought, and then says, “You’ve seen it before.”

“I’ve seen a lot of things before,” Din replies. “So you just talked his ear off when he wanted to read.”

“Do I have to remind you that I have nothing else to do?” Cheen says. “How many days have we been here now, Mando?”

Din glances at his chronometer. “Eight since the storm began. That’s no reason to keep bothering him. Leave him alone.”

“Why, so you can have him all to yourself? What’s so special about the fifth floor anyway? Wait, no, don’t tell me the details, I don’t want to know-”

“What are you talking about?” Din asks, annoyed. Will Cheen ever stop talking? He’s even worse than the Mythrol. “We’re looking for Jedi relics like the ones you found.”

Cheen huffs, skeptical. “Keep telling yourself that.”

He shakes his head and walks away. “Forget it.”

“Already trying!”

Thoroughly irritated, Din leaves the hall and starts the now near-daily climb to the top. The fifth floor is in a much better state than when Din first walked the hallway, though he wonders what’ll happen after he and the others leave. How many more hundreds of years will pass before the temple finally collapses, burying the last memories of its Jedi residents under stone?

The Jedi joins him a couple hours later. Din emerges from what looks like a former study, empty-handed yet again, to see the Jedi peering into a previously excavated room. 

“Over here,” Din says.

The Jedi is only mildly disappointed by the lack of texts or anything remotely connected to the Jedi that isn’t about to fall apart. “I’m pretty happy with what we have, but it can't hurt to keep looking.”

“No,” Din agrees and they go to the next room to clear the rubble and search. 

There’s a question on the Jedi’s mind. Din can tell from the thoughtful frown on the Jedi’s face and the way he keeps glancing at Din’s utility belt. He supposes it is inevitable that the Jedi will ask again about the Darksaber, especially since Din refuses to use it whenever they fight. Din wishes it really was just a laser sword but the Darksaber can never be just another weapon. 

Perhaps, when the Jedi asks again, he can finally explain why.

The Jedi waits until late at night, after the Rodian had fallen asleep while pestering them both for answers about a Jedi’s powers and weapons. Like the past seven nights, it is quiet and dark except for the everpresent rain and the fire that flickers and glows, trying vainly to push back against the damp shadows. Like before, the Jedi is wearing his blindfold so that they can eat together, and the sight both comforts and confuses Din. It is so strange seeing anyone go out of their way to accommodate his creed. Omera gave him his space, Miggs denied ever seeing his face, and Boba didn’t care while most tended to question, pester, or harass him. Bo-Katan, Koska, and Axe never looked at him the same way after he accused them of being false Mandalorians, but the Jedi tore off a piece of his cloak and inconvenienced himself so that Din could keep his creed. 

Din is so lost in thought that he doesn’t hear the Jedi the first time. Something pushes against his foot and he blinks, realizing the Jedi is prodding him to get his attention. The Jedi points at the hilt hanging from Din’s belt with eerie precision.

“Is now a good time to talk about it?”

Din sighs and tosses what’s left of his ration into the fire. Where does he start? How does he start? There is so much Din doesn’t know about the Darksaber, which was one of his reasons for picking up bounties again. He needs his own ship so that he can find the Armorer and the rest of the covert before Bo-Katan finds him.

_“Don’t be a stranger.”_

“What do you want to know?” Din asks.

“Well, it’s a lightsaber. A black-bladed one. I’ve never seen anything like it. You’re not a Jedi, so how did you get it?”

Din has no opinion on how a lightsaber is and isn’t supposed to look. He’s no expert on the make and model of such a weapon, only that it is an extremely dangerous one and full of significance. He does have plenty to say about how the Darksaber came into his possession. “I defeated Moff Gideon in combat and took it from him.”

A shadow falls over the Jedi’s face. “And how did he get his hands on it?”

“He took it from Bo-Katan Kryze. You met her. She was on the bridge with me.”

The Jedi frowns, recalling a memory. “Did you recruit her or did she recruit you?”

“I needed help getting Grogu back from the moff and she was the one with a vendetta against him. When I first met her, I helped her commandeer an Imperial cruiser. She tried to get information from its captain about the Darksaber and the moff’s location. When we boarded his ship, she went looking for him but I found him first. She… wasn’t happy.”

“Why? He lost. Isn’t that what matters?” The Jedi tilts his head. “Then why do you still have the Darksaber? Why didn’t you give it to her?”

Din smiles grimly. It should be that simple, but nobody wanted to play by his rules. They wanted to play by the rules Moff Gideon loudly declared, the _story_ of the Darksaber that Bo-Katan believed would give her the right to rule.

“The Darksaber belonged to the first Mandalorian Jedi. It became a symbol of leadership. Whoever wields it can unite all of Mandalore… at least, what’s left of it. But you have to earn the right and for Mandalorians that means winning it in combat.”

“Which is what you did,” the Jedi says. “So what does that make you? Ruler of Mandalore?”

“I never set foot on it,” Din admits. “Why does anyone expect me to rule a world I’d never seen? It’s not even like I wanted this. It’s Bo-Katan who wants to take back Mandalore.”

The Jedi taps on his boot, musing. “Maybe that’s why the Darksaber came to you.”

“That makes no sense. All I wanted to do was save the kid and Moff Gideon was in the way. How does that make me the right person to reclaim Mandalore?”

The Jedi shrugs. “How am I the only one left to restore the Jedi Order? I was… I grew up on a farm. I wasn’t going anywhere but I couldn’t, _didn’t_ accept that I’d be a farmer for the rest of my life. Next thing you know, I’m fighting in the Rebellion. Next thing you know, I’m a Jedi, the last Jedi. There’s no one else to carry on the memories, the history, the traditions of the Jedi Order. That burden falls to me.”

Din shakes his head. Unlike the Jedi, he’s one of many Mandalorians scattered throughout the galaxy, surviving and preserving the way of Mandalore as they believe it. He knows nothing of Mandalore itself but what the covert told him, and Bo-Katan claims the stories are wrong. She claims he’s a child of a cult, raised by zealots who broke away from the greater society. She claims Mandalore as if it’s her right, but what can she do when she doesn’t have the Darksaber?

“Darksaber or no Darksaber, I’m not the Mandalorian for the job. That would be Bo-Katan.”

“But why does she _need_ the Darksaber to do it? I may have a lightsaber but I’d still be a Jedi without it.”

“It’s the story,” Din says, echoing the moff’s mocking words. “She needs it to rule. Right now, the story is that I defeated Moff Gideon and took it from him. She needs to defeat me to take it and become the rightful ruler of Mandalore.”

He pauses, remembering what else the moff said. Moff Gideon knew how to use his words to twist the vibro-knife, knew that Bo-Katan’s singular quest would drive her into Din’s path and possibly end it. It is what Din fears the most, the reason why he forced Bo-Katan to let him leave. He does not want to die over the Darksaber.

“Is that why you won’t use the Darksaber?” the Jedi asks. “You can’t risk losing it to someone else?”

It is so much more than that. If he uses it, if he relies on it to emerge victorious in battle, then he too is accepting its story. He doesn’t want to become part of the Darksaber’s story, though; he’s not from Mandalore and had never carried the burdens and memories of it with him. He may be the blade’s current wielder but he doesn't want what it brings to his life.

“It wouldn’t be right if the ruler is a moff or a Trandoshan or… a Jedi. If someone is to take the Darksaber from me, it should be another Mandalorian.”

The Jedi looks disappointed. He heaves a sigh and wryly says, “Then I suppose I’ll never get to use my lightsaber against it.”

“No.”

“But if Bo-Katan comes looking for a fight?”

“Then yes. She’ll have some kind of beskar weapon. It’ll be a fair fight.”

The Jedi shakes his head. “I still don’t understand why you need to fight each other. I mean, what happens if you die, if she dies? Is ruling Mandalore really worth that risk? Wouldn’t you want to keep everyone alive since there’s so few of you left?”

Din doesn’t have any good answer because the Jedi isn’t the one who should hear it. It should be Bo-Katan, and he knows she won’t listen to him. She believes the stories. She was the one who lost the Darksaber and Mandalore to Moff Gideon. She is the one who has the most to gain, and the only one standing in her way is a child of the Watch. 

“I don’t know,” he confesses. “I only know that I don’t want anything to do with this.”

The Jedi smiles sadly. “Not everyone has a choice.”

Din pulls his helmet back on. “No, but I want to think that I do.”

He turns away from the Jedi, pulling his cape around him, and closes his eyes.

* * *

Morning begins with a lightning bolt striking one of the buildings in the surrounding town. The thunderous crack makes Din leap to his feet, pistol in hand as he scans his surroundings. His heart pounds as he looks for danger but all he sees is the Jedi, who’d drawn out his lightsaber and is also searching for threats. They find none, though the Jedi immediately sees what caused the commotion.

“Looks like a lightning strike,” he says, pointing outside. “Hit one of the buildings and toppled it.”

Cheen sighs and wiggles his good foot. “Wish I was struck by lightning. Then I wouldn’t be sitting here wasting my life.”

Thunder rumbles overhead and the rain comes down even harder. Everyone tenses but lightning doesn’t strike the town again. After another minute, the Jedi picks up another text from Cheen’s knapsack and goes up the steps, presumably to meditate and read. Din tosses Cheen a ration and a half-filled canteen, then takes the other canteens to the entryway to empty and refill. He looks out at the flooded town; one of the roofless buildings is gone and Din can see blackened stone slowly sliding into the water.

He counts their stash and frowns; they’re running low on food and the storm shows no signs of letting up. He remembers the Jedi mentioning having an emergency supply in his X-Wing but Din would rather no one venture outside. The going looks treacherous and it will be so easy for someone to slip and drown. 

“Storm needs to end soon,” he sighs. 

“Why? Are we running out of rations?” Cheen demands.

“If it doesn’t stop raining, yes.”

The Rodian groans and slides down to the floor on his back. “I’m not starving to death on this rock, Mando.”

“Heard you the first hundred times.”

Din spends a couple hours checking and cleaning his gear and weapons. Everything passes muster but that doesn’t satisfy him. He sits and stares out at the rain and the sounds drill into his head. Something about the early morning lightning strike lingers in the air, an electric tension with no source or solution, and he can’t sit still.

“Maybe we’re all going mad,” Cheen mutters. 

Maybe. Din gets up and goes to the stairs. He pauses at the fourth floor and looks down the corridor to the ritual room. He can’t see clearly from this distance but he swears he can see the Jedi’s silhouette amidst the floating rocks. Stormclouds crackle and flash; shivering, Din goes up the next flight of stairs to the fifth floor.

He overturns four rooms and finds nothing again. He exits the fourth room and exhales loudly while looking up at the ceiling. He’s getting tired of seeing interlocking stones all around him. He’s getting tired of sifting through dust and debris, scraps of fabric and brittle gray wood. He’s getting tired of being surrounded by rain and thunder and lightning. He’s starting to wish he never took this job. 

He collides with the Jedi on his way back down to the first floor. Startled, the Jedi shoves him back with Force powers but catches Din before he falls. 

“Sorry, sorry,” the Jedi says frantically while pulling him back onto his feet with surprising ease. “I didn’t see you. Sorry.” 

Din waves the Jedi’s apologies off. He looks at the gloved hand gripping part of his chestplate and remembers that it’s cybernetic. “I should’ve paid attention.”

“It’s no excuse.” The Jedi lets him go and steps back. He rubs the back of his head and huffs, frustrated. “Meditation isn’t working and I want to throw this book at the sky.”

Din tilts his head, observing the tension in the Jedi’s stiff shoulders and the way his jaw keeps clenching. “We could spar. Get it all out before you blow up or something.”

“I would never,” the Jedi replies. “But we could do that.”

They head down to the ground level, where Cheen is once again throwing pebbles across the hall. He stops mid-throw and frowns suspiciously at them. Din only stares back at him while reaching for the beskar staff; the Jedi strides past Cheen to the other end of the hall, where he shrugs off his cloak and brings out his lightsaber.

“Oh kriff, finally,” Cheen says while Din walks by. “This is better than anything the HoloNet puts on. Knock him out, Jedi!”

The Jedi arches an eyebrow and nods at Cheen. “He really doesn’t like you.”

“I’m bringing him back to the guild in cuffs, so no.” Din hefts the staff, reacquainting himself with its weight and balance. “Rules?”

“Same as before.”

Din nods, then lunges forward. He catches the Jedi by surprise and lands a hit on his arm before he can get away. Din strikes again and the Jedi blocks the blow with his lightsaber. The Jedi slips away before he can react but Din lets his forward momentum carry him into his next attack. He twists and sweeps the staff around, trying to knock the Jedi off his feet; the Jedi leaps out of the way, hanging in the air a few seconds longer than is possible. He reminds Din of Ahsoka, who seemed to bound through the air unhindered by gravity.

The Jedi knocks him off his stride with Force powers and moves in to strike. Din blocks the lightsaber with his vambrace and uses his flamethrower to push the Jedi back. It only works for a few seconds and the Jedi banishes the flames with a gesture. 

“Dank farrik,” someone utters. It might be Din. It might be the Rodian.

They move back and forth across the hall, trading advantages but unable to take advantage of it. All Din needs is for the Jedi to slip up, to make a mistake, to misjudge when he parries a blow and tries to find an opening. It never comes. The Jedi is sharp, too sharp, and Din starts to stumble. His lungs burn and sweat drips into his eyes. Years of experience keeps him on his feet but he knows he’s going to lose.

The next time he strikes, the Jedi deflects not with his lightsaber but with his powers. The staff hits some invisible, unmovable force and the shock of impact makes him drop it. He crouches like he’s reaching for it but when the Jedi rolls the staff away, Din grabs the vibro-knife in his boot and surges forward. The blade stops short of nicking the Jedi’s neck. The lightsaber hums against his beskar chestplate. 

“Where did that come from?” the Jedi asks lightly. He’s breathing hard and every intake puts him within centimeters of the sharp edge.

“My boot.”

They pull apart and Din puts the vibro-knife back in his boot. He picks up the staff and takes a few steps back. The Jedi rakes back hair from his forehead, wipes away the sweat, and activates his lightsaber. Din shifts into position and braces himself, heart beating loudly under the beskar and in his head. 

Then the Jedi withdraws the lightsaber’s green blade and tucks the hilt under his arm. “Hang on.”

Din watches curiously and then with alarm when the Jedi searches his belt and pulls out the strip of black cloth. “You’re not serious.”

“I like where this is going!” Cheen shouts.

“Shut it.” Din watches the Jedi test the blindfold’s knot with increasing trepidation. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

“Oh, definitely,” the Jedi says while taking up his lightsaber. “When I first started training, I used a pilot helmet with the blast shield down to cover my eyes. Once Grogu gets more comfortable with the Force, he’ll go through this kind of training, too.”

“You’re going to have him fight you while blindfolded?”

“Not me. A training droid. I taught my sister, too. To be honest, I think she’s better at it than I was.”

The whole thing sounds suspect—who gives a child a lightsaber and expects them to not destroy things or hurt people? —but what does Din know about a Jedi’s teaching methods? He shrugs and hefts the beskar staff, and then starts wondering. Last night’s conversation about the Darksaber comes to the fore, including the absolute fact that Bo-Katan will seek him out to win it back. Is there no better time than now to learn how to use the Darksaber? The Jedi knows the bare bones of the Darksaber’s story and Cheen knows nothing. If Din loses this fight, he’ll only have to give up his dignity for a few days. He’ll still have his life. He’ll still have the Darksaber.

“Okay,” Din says. He goes to lean the beskar staff against the wall and then unhooks the Darksaber’s hilt from his belt.

“ _Yes!_ ” the Jedi exclaims when the air suddenly hums with two laser swords. “Finally!”

“What the—you have a laser sword, Mando?” Cheen sputters. “Since when?”

“Does it matter?” He tests the heft and weight of the black blade; he knows his way around so many weapons but nothing prepared him for the feel of a sword that thrums and glows in his hands, that feels _alive_. “You know what this means. Whatever happens here stays here.”

“Don’t worry,” the Jedi says. “I won’t say a word.”

Din looks over his shoulder at the Rodian, who simply says, “Better get him good, Jedi.”

He sighs and faces forward. “I’m ready.”

The Jedi leaps forward, green lightsaber slicing through the air, and the fight begins. Din is better with the staff and so much better with guns, and struggles to keep up as the Jedi keeps probing and pushing through his defenses. Din uses his armor more than the Darksaber to block otherwise fatal blows and his hits barely land; the Jedi is never where Din needs him to be and the Darksaber never lands when expected to. Din keeps miscalculating the strength and reach of the black blade, leading to too many close calls. He slips and slides around the hall, familiarizing himself with the Darksaber on the fly while the Jedi pushes him back and forth with the lightsaber and the Force.

“Come on, Mando! You’re letting yourself get beat by a blindfolded Jedi? What kind of Mandalorian are you?”

Din is almost tempted to throw a flash charge at Cheen but Greef specifically asked that he be brought back alive. He’d tell off the Rodian but he’s too busy trying not to lose. By now, he knows he’ll never beat the Jedi like this; the Jedi had years to practice while the Darksaber fell into his hands several months ago. But Mandalorians are nothing if not resourceful, and he just needs to wait for the right moment to strike.

The Darksaber is becoming a familiar weight in his hands, an extension of his arms with a reach that allows him to deflect and twist and strike and draw back for another attack. He watches the Jedi’s movements carefully and begins mimicking them; he won’t have the Jedi’s grace or powers but he can learn how to counterattack. He smiles when he finally, successfully, evades and deflects the lightsaber and sees the surprise on the Jedi’s face. He does it again, parrying and then slipping away to strike from another angle. The Jedi follows him this time and deflects with Force powers before pushing him away.

The Jedi is tiring. He has to concentrate to defend himself, and relies more and more on his powers to push Din away. Din is feeling the toll, too; his limbs ache, his lungs burn, and he doesn’t know when a lucky blow will knock the Darksaber out of his hands. He needs to end this fight soon and for that he needs an opening. Like now. He blocks the Jedi’s next swing but instead of letting the Jedi slip away and try again, he shoves forward. Light blazes where the Darksaber presses against the lightsaber, electrifying the air. Then Din lets go of the Darksaber with his left hand and unleashes his flamethrower. 

The Jedi leaps back from the fireball and quickly redirects it. He twists away from the Darksaber’s reach but Din follows with his whipcord; it catches the Jedi’s right ankle and brings him down. The Jedi quickly cuts through it with his lightsaber and jumps back to his feet. He manages to block the Darksaber but Din forces his lightsaber to slide down and away. Before the Jedi can use his powers, Din shoves him into the wall. The Darksaber stops short of cutting the Jedi’s throat. Something hums hotly against Din’s side and he tilts his head to see the lightsaber hovering exactly where the beskar doesn’t protect him.

Cheen groans. “Why can’t one of you just kill the other and make things interesting?”

Din doesn’t hear him. He doesn’t hear anything; his harsh breaths are too loud in his helmet and his heart pounds in his head like drums. 

“Not bad,” the Jedi says breathlessly. Light hair sticks to his forehead and sweat drips down his face into his blindfold. His face is dark with exertion and Din can almost picture the red flush but not the reason why the thought occurs to him. “Guess we’ll call it even. The Darksaber’s still yours.”

It takes entirely too long to find his tongue. “... yes.”

Din steps back and dismisses the Darksaber’s blade. So does the Jedi and he sidles past Din to walk to the end of the hall. He still hasn’t taken off his blindfold. Din watches him, then looks back at Cheen, who’s grumbling to himself while facing away from them. Din decides to follow the Jedi to the entryway where the temple ends and the rain begins. The Jedi sticks his hand out to feel the rainfall and then leans forward to drench his whole head. 

The Jedi cocks his head in Din’s direction, then turns to him. Water streams down his face in rivulets. The blindfold is drenched; it must be heavy and soggy, but the Jedi doesn’t pull it off. 

“It feels nice,” the Jedi says. “Go on. I still can’t see.”

He could excuse himself and retreat to the fourth floor like before, but Din doesn’t want to leave. He hesitates, looks over his shoulder once more, and then turns his back to the Rodian. He slowly pulls his helmet off and sighs in relief at the cold air buffeting his hot sticky face. He doesn’t hesitate to lean out and let the storm pour down on his bared head, sluicing away the sweat and grime. Thunder rolls overhead and everything feels wild and alive.

Din steps back from the downpour. He shakes his head, drags hair out of his eyes and wipes away the water before putting his helmet back on.

“Wait.”

There’s a hand on his forearm and he allows the Jedi to lower the helmet. The Jedi leans in slowly, cautiously, and Din holds very, very still. He doesn’t dare breathe. No one has ever gotten this close to him while he’s without his helmet in decades, but he doesn’t push the Jedi away. He doesn’t want to.

“May I?” the Jedi asks softly.

Din hesitates. He thinks he knows—no, he _knows_ what the Jedi is asking permission for. His mouth dries and his throat tightens; whatever he says now will change him, will change _them_. Does he give it? Does he want to?

_Yes._

“Yes.”

The Jedi’s lips are sweet with rainwater and soft and warm. He kisses Din slowly, carefully, waiting for him to back away, but Din doesn’t. His heart hasn’t stopped racing since the day began with that lightning strike, but now he thinks it might burst. He wishes he wasn’t holding his helmet. He wants to pull his gloves off and feel the Jedi’s face with his bared hands.

Instead he stands still, holding the helmet tightly, eyes sliding shut while the Jedi kisses him again and again and again. It’s as if the Jedi had been imagining doing this for days.

“I wasn’t sure if you felt the same way,” the Jedi murmurs as if he’d been reading Din’s thoughts.

“Oh.”

The Jedi smiles and kisses him once more before stepping back. “Okay. You can put your helmet back on.”

He forgot he was holding it. Din turns away under the pretense of doing so, but instead he takes a deep, shaky breath and touches his lip. A part of him is in disbelief. Another part wonders what will happen when the storm ends. He clamps down on his thoughts and pulls the helmet over his head. When he turns back around, the Jedi is removing the blindfold and squeezing out water. He wipes his face with it and wrings out even more water. When he notices Din watching, he smiles. It’s not quite as bright but it is tentative and warm and hopeful. It makes Din feel light just to see it.

“We should do that again,” he says. “Fight with lightsabers, I mean.”

“I’ll probably lose,” Din says.

“I don’t know. You’re more terrifying than you think. Do all Mandalorians fight like you?”

He shrugs. “Probably.”

“Good to know,” the Jedi says. “Tomorrow?”

He’ll probably be in a lot of pain when he wakes tomorrow, but he can’t help himself. “Tomorrow.”

The Jedi’s smile grows wider and brighter than any star. Din can’t look away nor does he want to. It’s as warm as the Jedi’s affection for him and he wants to remember it long after they go their separate ways.


	4. The Woods

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love, love, love all the comments you've been sending. Thank you, they are all so lovely to read.
> 
> This chapter is going out earlier than planned because a friend had a Bad Day and I'm hoping this'll cheer them up.

Din stares down at the pitiful pile of supplies. “We have seven ration packs left.”

Cheen doesn’t bother mustering outrage. He stares at the handful of foodstuff in his cuffed hands and sighs, defeated. “I’m going to starve to death on this rock, aren’t I? And for what? A bunch of old books?”

“Hey, you chose the job. If you hadn’t, we wouldn’t be here,” Din retorts. He bites his cheek once he realizes what he just said and turns to the Jedi, who’s staring at the rations with a look of intense concentration. “Your associate, what else did he tell you about Vos-3? Did he tell you anything about the people that lived here? How they lived? What they ate?”

The Jedi shakes his head. “The idea was to come here, find anything useful as quickly as possible, and leave before a storm comes.” 

Din looks out at the gray mist shrouding the flooded town. He thinks about the strange six-legged creature in the woods. “There has to be something out there we can hunt.”

“With all that rain?” the Jedi says. “Could be dangerous. How do you expect us to carry anything back? What if we can’t find anything?”

Cheen huffs loudly. “You got any better ideas, Jedi? Or do you want to starve?”

The Jedi scratches the back of his head. The expression on his face suggests he does have an idea. “I have that emergency stash in my X-Wing. Should take a day getting there and back, and my supplies should last us another seven days, maybe? Ten?”

Unsaid is the uncertainty of _when_ the storm will end. It has been raining and thundering for ten days now and the sky shows no signs of letting up and moving on. The storm could vanish tomorrow. It could last a hundred days more. 

Din decides not to dwell on the thought. It won’t help anyone.

He stares at the rain and the faint shapes of the town’s broken buildings. He remembers the sight from the ritual room; ten days of heavy rain flooded the town with fast-flowing water while thick mist shrouded the surrounding forest. Reaching the woods will be dangerous and then there’s the long trek to wherever the Jedi landed his X-Wing. Experience warns him against spending more than a couple hours outside of the temple. Cold will sap one’s strength and that’s when the real trouble begins. 

“Bad idea,” he says. “A day is too far in this weather.”

“We don’t have a lot of options,” the Jedi replies. “I think chasing after something is riskier than walking to my X-Wing.”

Din looks down at the rations and counts again. The numbers don’t lie. They need to eat and to do that they need to go into the woods. He hates to admit that the Jedi is right; he can’t guarantee they’ll find anything out there that’s edible but what the Jedi brings back will keep them alive. The problem is, someone has to stay behind with Cheen and only one person knows where the X-Wing is located.

“Don’t like the idea of you going out there,” he says. 

He counts the rations once again. 

“I can take care of myself,” the Jedi says. “I’m pretty fast and traveling light. I’ll be back by nightfall.”

He looks at Din patiently, waiting for him to agree. Din hesitates. The reasoning is there and so is the threat of starvation. He just doesn’t like the idea of the Jedi leaving the temple alone. It could be gut instinct. It could be the sinking feeling of knowing too many things can go wrong instantly. It could be… it could be that if something happens to the Jedi, Din won’t be there to help him. 

He shakes his head and sighs. “Fine.”

The Jedi smiles and clasps a hand on his upper arm, squeezes reassuringly, and then slips past before Din can react. He sweeps up his cloak and shrouds himself in it, holsters the blaster pistol Din gave him, and strides out of the temple. Din watches the rainfall shroud the Jedi; he could be imagining things but the Jedi glances over his shoulder once, hooded face turning to Din, before looking ahead and disappearing. 

Din forces his hands to relax. He forces himself to breathe.

Cheen settles against the wall with a long-suffering sigh. “We’re done for.”

Din ignores the Rodian, and grabs a ration and a canteen before going up the stairs. He’s in no mood to deal with Cheen and without the Jedi around, he has nothing to do but continue excavating the fifth floor. He walks through the dim hallway to the last room he searched, peers inside to confirm there’s nothing worth looking at, and then continues down to the next room. The dividing wall between it and the adjacent room had collapsed, covering the floor with stone. Din sighs, looks over his shoulder, and then remembers that he is alone. He halfheartedly starts digging through the rubble.

After two hours, he has to sit. His body still aches from yesterday’s frenetic fight and he groans while settling against the wall in the corridor. No one is around and he slowly pulls off his helmet. He leans against the stone wall, breathing in cold stale air and feeling the sweat cool on his forehead. His hands and shoulders are sore from dislodging stone and sifting through rubble. He wishes the Jedi was here to lend a helping hand and use his powers to lift all these rocks away. He wishes the Jedi was here to talk about the temple, about the Jedi texts, about Cheen’s hostility toward Din, about the Jedi Order, about Grogu. He wishes… he wishes the Jedi was here with him.

He presses the back of his hand to his lips and closes his eyes, thinking about the bright glow of the Darksaber, the wild thunder and rain, the taste and feel of the Jedi’s mouth. 

He can’t lie and pretend it wasn’t on his mind all night, long after the others fell asleep. The Jedi curled up across the hall from him and Cheen, but this time he was facing them and Din watched him slumber for hours. He watched and wondered what it meant that he allowed the Jedi to get so close. He could tell himself he was lonely. He’d been lonely since he left the light cruiser and went back to Nevarro, looking for a new ship, a means to get away. Then he came here, chasing a bounty, and collided with the Jedi. What were the odds?

What will happen once the storm ends? What will become of them when they go their separate ways, when the Jedi returns to Grogu while he continues running from the specter of Mandalore? Will their time here fade? He supposes it is inevitable but the idea fills him with an unfamiliar dread. He’ll be alone again. He’d be without Grogu… or the Jedi. 

The Jedi offered Din the coordinates to Grogu. Once the storm ends, he needs to ask for them. He needs to be able to find them both if only to reassure himself.

When he can flex his hands without every bone aching and protesting, he gets back to his feet and enters the room in front of him to finish the search. He leaves his helmet on the floor. He comes up empty-handed and steps outside. He stares at his helmet, then sits down next to it and opens the ration pack. He washes out the bland mealy mouthfuls with rainwater, then puts the helmet back on and moves to the next room.

The doorway is blockaded with rocks. There is no way around them and he has to dislodge every rock by hand to create an opening large enough to squeeze through. He tumbles out the other side into what looks like a study room. Stone shelves line the walls and the remnants of a wooden desk rots away in a corner. There may have been books once, but they are now wrinkled bits and pieces of paper with no meaning or purpose, words lost to time and the elements. This whole room is exposed to the storm; part of the wall collapsed at some point, allowing a damp wind to blow relentlessly. Din’s cape flutters around his ankles as he prowls around, searching for anything useful, anything interesting, anything with meaning. 

Lightning flashes and he braces for the thunder. Right after it rumbles overhead, lightning strikes again and this time the bright light illuminates something even more brilliant under the rubble. It is a sliver of something that isn’t stone but buried under it. Din gets to his knees and carefully pulls away the pieces until he uncovers a crystalline cube. Its walls are translucent but he can’t see anything inside. There are no latches or hinges, no triggers or mechanisms to open the cube and reveal its cloudy contents. Still, it is such a strange find that Din pockets it before resuming his search.

He finds nothing else of use and moves on.

Din excavates one more room before returning to the first floor. Cheen is dozing off but shakes himself awake as Din strides past to the Rodian’s knapsack of Jedi texts. He deposits the crystalline cube and then looks around the hall.

“Jedi’s not back yet,” Cheen says. He yawns. “Bet you the floodwaters got him.”

“You have nothing to bet with,” Din replies. He goes to the other side of the hall and sits facing the Rodian. He pulls his cape around his shoulders, crosses his ankles, and waits.

The rain lulls him. Try as he might, Din nods off. He dreams—of a cloaked figure treading towards him, a black blade glowing white in their hand. Their face is in shadows until the very last second; the figure strikes him down with the Darksaber and Din catches a glimpse of red hair. He lurches forward with a start and a gasp, hand reaching for his belt. The hilt is still there and the only other person in the temple is Cheen.

“No, Mando, your precious Jedi isn’t here,” Cheen says loudly, dragging each syllable out like it physically pains him to do so.

Din sighs. “He’s not my-”

“Oh cut the bantha crap. You know what’s worse than sitting around and staring at the rain with cuffed hands and a broken foot? Watching you two walk around each other like a pair of Loth-cats in heat. I’d rather get frozen in carbonite. Put me out of my misery.”

“I could toss you out in the rain,” Din suggests. He keeps his fingers relaxed and his hands in his lap. “Lightning strike took out a whole building.”

“I want to be _out_ , not dead,” Cheen says flatly. “Unless we’re about to starve, in which case toss me in the water. Listen, Mando, I don’t want to see anything or hear anything until we’re back on Nevarro. Do you hear me? I’d rather have Greef Karga and the entire guild ream me out. Seriously. _Worst_ job I ever picked up.”

“Why did you?” Din asks, annoyed. “Why take the job in the first place?”

“I want to get paid. How do you think I kept my crew from wringing my neck? Client was offering enough credits to refit my ship, stock my lockers, pay my crew, everything. All I had to do was find anything worthwhile on this miserable rock.”

Din wonders who this client is and why they were interested in the forgotten Jedi temple. He then remembers the Jedi saying Cheen had intercepted communications between him and his associate about Vos-3. And then Din wonders why the client wants artifacts from a _Jedi_ temple. Dread sinks and spreads from the pit of his stomach; what if Cheen’s client was another Imperial?

“Your client was looking for Jedi artifacts?” he asks, taking care to keep his voice even and businesslike. 

“I didn’t ask questions. I just did what I was told to do. ‘This world was abandoned before the Galactic Republic rose to prominence, here are your coordinates, go find anything worth smuggling out.’ I was doing that when you and the Jedi showed up.”

“How did you intercept the Jedi’s messages?”

“I didn’t. My client gave me the information.”

If Cheen’s client is indeed another Imperial, then the Jedi is a target. How else could they have picked up the communiques? And if the Jedi is a target, so is Grogu.

“What’s with the questions?” Cheen grumbles. “Why are you so interested now? Not like it’ll do you any good if we don’t get off this planet.”

Din shakes his head and turns to face the end of the hall. He checks his chronometer before settling in for the watch. Half a day is gone. Din will give the Jedi until the next day before he lets himself worry.

* * *

He worries. They have two days’ worth of rations left and the Jedi hasn’t returned. Even Cheen starts fidgeting and fretting, though his concerns are mostly with the prospect of starving to death. Din shares that fear but his thoughts concentrate on the Jedi. Did he have to shelter from the storm? Is he on his way back now? Or did something happen while he went searching for his X-Wing?

Din goes up to the fifth floor but not for long. He can’t find a reason to keep searching for more books, more strange crystalline objects, more of anything that the Jedi might find useful. If the Jedi doesn’t return, what becomes of Grogu? What becomes of Din?

The Jedi is still missing when he returns to the hall empty-handed. He tells himself the Jedi will return soon but half a day passes and he can’t wait any longer. He knows what he must do.

Din checks his gear and his weapons, hides his vibro-knife in his boot and holsters his pistol, hooks his beskar staff to his back, and removes the rope around Cheen’s ankles.

“You won’t get fair,” Din says, looking at Cheen’s wrapped foot and bandaged thigh while the Rodian slowly stands. “And even if you try, you’ll either drown or die of hypothermia. So staying put in this temple with the fire and the rest of the rations is your best bet. Got it?”

Cheen glowers at him while leaning heavily against the wall. “Do I look like I can go anywhere? Besides, I _like_ being alive. Go on, find your Jedi. I’ll stay here remembering how feet work and counting how many lightning strikes there are before nightfall. Maybe I’ll die of boredom instead.”

Din sighs and picks up a ration pack. “Just don’t overdo things. Save your strength for later.”

“Later? You’re going to die out there, Mando. No matter how light beskar is, it’s heavier than water and it’s going to drag you down to drown.” Cheen shakes his head. “Waste of beskar.”

Din huffs and walks away. He stops at the divide between the temple and the rain, staring out at the frothing deep waters around the structure and the hazy shapes of the woods and the far distant mountains. He then realizes his left hand is resting on the Darksaber hilt and lowers it. He activates the tracking in his helmet and scans for traces of the Jedi’s footsteps. He doesn’t expect to find much but… there, ahead and to his left, is the fading impression of a boot on the edge of the temple’s foundation. It points in the direction of the abandoned town.

He steps out into the rain and it pelts him, heavy rapid droplets plinking on his helmet and pauldrons. His cape is drenched in seconds and pulls on his neck and shoulders as he walks to the steps. Water swirls and flows from his right to left, carrying branches, leaves, small drowned creatures. Underwater, he sees another faint glowing impression of a boot. Din braces himself and steps down. The current slams into his shins and he staggers to the side. Digging his heels in, he finds his balance, and steps forward. He has to fight the currents to cross the abandoned town and he has to make every step count. He only has so much time and energy to lose trying to reach the forest.

Thunder and lightning roll and flash overhead while he slowly makes his way through the town. A long wet branch nearly knocks him off his feet as it sweeps by; it gets trapped in the foundations of a toppled building and Din grabs it to help him ford through the flood. Time drags as he tracks the fading footprints down the drowned streets until finally the ground rises out of the water. He climbs onto soggy turf at the edge of town and checks his chronometer. At least thirty minutes passed since he left the temple but it felt like hours.

“Great,” he sighs. 

He looks around, gaze lingering on the ghostly silhouette of the temple before searching the dense green woods before him. He spots more footprints on the ground heading into the forest and follows them.

There’s something about walking through the deep dark woods during a thunderstorm. The canopy provides relief from the rainfall and muffles the thunder. All that water falling from the sky still has to go somewhere and the ground can only take so much; everywhere he steps, his boots squelch and leave behind pools of water. The soft ground pulls at his feet, forcing him to expend more effort than he’d like. Din wonders how the Jedi managed; his footsteps look swift and certain as they move between the trees.

He stops at the edge of what used to be a creek. It is swollen with rainwater and moving deceptively fast. Din looks up and down the flooded bank and then at the other side, where the Jedi’s trail resumes. He takes a few steps back, then runs and leaps over the creek. His boots stick in the mud but his cape and staff are too heavy and he stumbles back. He stabs the ground with the branch and manages not to tumble headfirst into the water.

“Dank farrik,” he mutters. He forces himself upright, wrenches the branch out of the ground, and trudges forward. 

He’s getting cold. However much heat he exerts with constant motion, the cold rain saps it away. He shivers as water continues seeping under his armor and into his clothes. The only thing still dry is his head.

“Why couldn’t it be a warm planet?” he mutters, though the last time he visited such a planet he thought he’d drown in his helmet. It did not filter out the heavy humidity as well as he’d like.

Din doesn’t stop moving but he’s slowing down. He’s less attentive of his surroundings and trips over tree roots, rocks, clumps of tough grass and brush. He searches for safer footing to cross another swollen stream and loses time picking up the Jedi’s trail. He is growing tired and the Jedi is still moving forward.

“Where are you, Jedi?” he wonders while pushing past thick brush and fern. His toe catches on a gnarled knot of tree root and he stumbles into a moss-covered trunk. He leans against it while the tree’s branches and broad leaves shield him from the rain, feeling like a fool.

He tilts his head. Something changed in the Jedi’s footsteps. They pick up the pace and then vanish into the mist. Din ventures back out into the storm and follows them. The treeline fades, giving way to a large sloping clearing. The Jedi’s steps travel up and then down to the bottom of the slope, following deep gouges in the earth. Din follows, careful not to slip on the wet grass, and then abruptly stops. He tosses the branch aside and slowly walks up to an X-Wing lying on its side near a flooded river, nose buried in mud and grass. The starfighter must’ve slid down as the constant rain weakened the earth beneath it.

The Jedi’s steps circle around the starfighter, a T-65B model bearing many scars. Din follows the steps slowly, checking the ground and his surroundings. He sees nothing incriminating but the Jedi is nowhere to be seen. His footfalls suggest he didn’t stay with his X-Wing for long and instead walked away into the heavy gray fog. Din steps forward to follow but when he glances over his shoulder, he sees a blinking light in the cockpit.

There is a transmission. Did the Jedi see it before wandering away? Din scans his surroundings but his visor picks up no heat signatures or other tracks. He walks up to the toppled X-Wing and searches for a grip and a foothold, and then hauls himself up onto the spacecraft. He looks around the cockpit for a release mechanism, then sighs and pries off a panel to override the lock. The hatch releases and he shimmies inside the cockpit, mindful of his staff colliding with and scratching the X-Wing. He pulls the canopy over his head, sealing him in. He has to lean forward to keep his staff from scratching up the cockpit. Rain pitter-patters on the transparisteel while he carefully searches around the tight space. He opens various hatches, reaches inside alcoves, twists and turns in the seat, and then finally finds a stash of rations right behind it. He also finds medpacs.

“These could be useful,” he muses out loud. He finds an empty satchel and sweeps all of the supplies into it.

He then looks at the front of the cockpit and stares at the blinking transmission light. Should he play it? Will the Jedi mind? Who tried to reach him before the storm cut off all contact? He searches for the switch to let the transmission play.

The starfighter projects a small hologram of a young woman’s head and shoulders. Her dark hair is braided and coiled around her head, and her eyes are just as dark and very sharp. She resembles the Jedi in many other ways but she doesn’t have his bright disposition. The projection is grainy, staticky like it traveled a great distance. It probably did.

_“... tell me you didn’t land already. Luke, the… that something’s going to… Tekka told me where you went. If you get caught in those… better respond. The temple can wait. I… neither can Grogu.”_

A sudden babbling sound interrupts the woman. Din’s breath catches in the back of his throat and he coughs hard while she looks elsewhere. Her stern gaze softens and she smiles reassuringly at something—some _one_ off-screen.

_“Hey, it’s okay. It’s okay… told him about the planet. He’ll get the message and… back soon. You hear me, Luke? Get back….”_

The hologram stops. It loops back to the beginning and the woman is looking straight ahead again. _“... tell me you didn’t-”_

Din ends the transmission and slowly sits back in the pilot’s seat. He doesn’t know where to begin. No, he does, because his heart won’t stop pounding. Grogu was there when this woman sent her message to—to _Luke_. The Jedi’s name is Luke.

“Luke,” he slowly says, feeling out the single syllable on his tongue.

The Jedi’s name is Luke, this woman with the dark hair and dark eyes must be his sister, and Grogu was in the same room as her, telling her something. How long has it been since Din heard the kid’s voice? Why couldn’t she have picked him up so that Din could see him? His eyes are hot and he blinks rapidly, forcing back the tears. He has no time to cry.

He plays the Jedi’s sister’s message one more time. She knows where they are. Whoever this Tekka is, they told her about Vos-3, so he must be the associate the Jedi told him about. She knows about the storms. She knows what kind of danger the Jedi is in. And, Din realizes, so does Grogu The kid knows, somehow, that this planet is trouble for his guardian. And it is trouble, because the Jedi is nowhere to be found. 

Purpose burns hotly in his chest and Din sits up straight, pulling the satchel into his lap. He reaches for the release mechanism.

“Okay, kid,” Din says. “I’m going to find him and send him back to you. I promise.”

The rain seems to fall even harder, punching down on his head and shoulders as he walks away from the toppled X-Wing and starts tracking the Jedi’s— _Luke’s_ footprints. They wander into the mist rising from the ground and shrouding the woods. Din can only sigh when he realizes the Jedi had gone into them.

Din walks under the canopy, watching the faint trail. The footsteps seem to meander. The Jedi was uncertain as they came through this part of the forest. And then Din stops at a fallen tree. He’d seen plenty of toppled trees but those had either grown too old or too heavy or simply rotted from the inside out. This tree had been brought down by force; the damage is raw and jagged like something large smashed into it recently. Din circles the tree stump, studying the ground; something violently tore up the earth, uprooting grass and nearby tree roots. To his dismay, he sees Luke’s footprints in the churned mud. Something had attacked the Jedi here. Din follows the Jedi’s tracks deeper into the forest, followed closely by whatever was chasing him.

“Damn it,” Din mutters, staring at the beast’s path of destruction.

The chase smashes through the trees and splinters stone, splashes over flooded creeks, slides down slopes, and staggers up hills. Din runs along this exhausting trail while the thunderstorm rumbles and roars overhead. He crests a hill and trips over the stiff leg of a dead creature. He lands in a heap, gasping for air and shaking from overexertion. He slowly pushes himself up, unsticking himself from the earth. Rain washes away mud and grass while he turns to study the soggy carcass. The creature is large and furred with short fat horns and a blunt muzzle full of sharp teeth. It has six long limbs that end in padded paws with muddy black claws. Din looks closely and sees blaster marks on its flank. Something sliced under its belly, exposing reddish purple innards. There is another slash at its short thick neck. The skin around the wound is blackened.

“Laser sword,” Din realizes and looks around the hill. “His lightsaber….”

The Jedi is still nowhere to be seen. Din switches on the tracker and almost sighs in relief when he sees footsteps going away from the creature. These steps are fresher and glow on his visor. And then he takes in the uneven strides and realizes that Luke is limping. Din slips and staggers downhill, and kicks up the blaster pistol he gave the Jedi days earlier. He doesn’t know how long it sat out here in the rain but when he picks it up, he sees reddish smears in the grooves and crevices. He shoves it in the satchel with the emergency supplies.

Din follows the Jedi’s limping steps through the darkening woods. The heavy gray sky is growing dim and the lightning crackling within the clouds is brighter. How many hours had passed since he left the Jedi temple? How far is he from it?

His visor starts spotting other footprints in the drenched earth. They are so faint that he’ll never know where they went but they cross over each other. Could they be from Cheen’s crew? Din stops and looks around but sees nothing through the trees and rain. He turns his attention back to the Jedi’s trail and continues. He could read the slow agony in every uneven step; his jaw clenches and his shoulders tense as he follows.

And then he walks into another clearing. It is smaller than the one the X-Wing had landed in, but not so small that it couldn’t easily fit a Rodian’s repurposed Imperial cargo barge. It looks like a battering ram and could easily fit Cheen and his crew… or a lone Jedi. The trail goes up the opened ramp; Din looks around the clearing but the only heat signature he picks up is faint and in the barge. 

It isn’t moving.

A thousand curses fill his thoughts as he hurries up the ramp and into the ship. Its cargo hold is more spacious than he’s used to, but his old beloved _Razor Crest_ could be crewed by a single person. This vessel must’ve required at least four to travel safely between systems and fend off attacks from other bounty hunters, smugglers, New Republic patrols, and Imperial cruisers with their supplies of TIE fighters. Din looks around while following the muddy staggered steps through the hold. Cheen had built in individual lockers, netting for crewmembers to sleep in, his own damn freezing chamber. Din scowls at it while walking past; luckily for him, Cheen didn’t have anyone locked up in carbonite or else Din would’ve had to work out the logistics of hauling Cheen _and_ his bounties back to Nevarro. 

One of the lockers is open and its sides are smeared with drying blood. It holds medpacs, rations, and tools. Someone—the Jedi, Luke—had pulled most of the items to the floor and Din grabs two medpacs before continuing his search. The trail of mud is now tinged with blood and a terrible fear sets in, gnawing at him as he continues through the cargo hold.

Din finds the Jedi sitting up against the wall near an alcove hiding a refresher. The Jedi breathes shallowly, eyes closed and hands limp at his side. He has a sickly pallor and his lips are turning blue from the cold or from his wounds. There are bloody streaks on the floor, dark and tacky; the Jedi had been here for a while. Din crouches by Luke’s side, pulls off his right glove, and checks for a pulse. It thumps weakly under his calloused fingertips.

He searches the Jedi for injuries. Scratches mark his face and left hand; he has a torn lip and a short wide gash over his right temple. Din then finds ripped fabric and deep red gashes in the Jedi’s left side. He remembers the creature’s blunt claws as he opens a medpac and hopes the creature isn’t venomous. Bacta can only do so much.

There is another deep gash in the Jedi’s right leg and it bleeds sluggishly. Din cleans it as best as he can, opens another medpac, and covers it in bacta gel and bandages. Neither will solve a more serious problem, which is hypothermia. The ship has been sitting in the woods for a very long time and the interior is uncomfortably cold. Din needs to find dry blankets and dry heat, fast. He searches the other lockers and containers, grabs every ratty blanket and piece of clothing he can find, and piles them around the Jedi. Luke still breathes lightly but he doesn’t seem to struggle as much. He shivers and Din realizes the ship needs to be brought online to raise the temperature in the cargo hold.

Cheen apparently installed security measures against his own crew because Din has to blast down the locked door between the cargo hold and the rest of the barge. It takes a few frantic tries to find the cockpit where he brings the barge’s systems and engines online. The walls of the ship thrum as he leaves the cockpit. He thinks about searching Cheen’s transmissions for the mystery client who could be targeting the Jedi and Grogu, but his priority right now is saving the Jedi. He cannot allow Luke to sicken and die.

The ship’s life support systems kick in as he strides back to the cargo hold. He raises the ramp, sealing him and the Jedi inside the ship and out of the storm, and grabs a few water and food rations from the opened locker. He brings them back to the Jedi and steps over to the side without the dried blood. He leans his staff against the wall and kneels to check the Jedi’s vitals again. Luke breathes more easily now and his pulse is steadier and stronger. Relieved, Din sits down next to him and then realizes his mistake. Exhaustion rolls in, wave upon wave of drowsiness and fog that pull at his limbs, his heavy head. As the ship slowly warms, Din feels the soggy weight of his cape and his clothes, the cold weight of his beskar, the terrible aching in his joints. He manages to lift his helmet up to take several gulps of water from his canteen, and then he slumps over and passes out.

* * *

He dreams of Maldo Kreis and its caverns of ice and stone. Spiders crawl all around him, legs tapping in a staccato as they try to trap him in their webbing. No matter how many he shoots down and torches, more keep crawling down the frozen walls toward him, landing on his head and shoulders, teeth scraping against the beskar. They herd him away from the _Razor Crest_ , from safety and freedom. The leg of a massive spider crashes down from above, showering him in snow and ice. He has to watch its looming shape as he runs so as to not be speared by it. He finally takes the Darksaber from his belt. It slashes through the leg and the massive spider shrieks and falls through the ice, crushing him.

Din wakes with a gasp and launches into a crouch, hand closing around the hilt on his waist. Heart hammering, he scans his surroundings and realizes he’s not buried under a massive ice spider deep inside Maldo Kreis’s depths. He’s inside a ship’s cargo hold and no one is trying to ambush him to take the Darksaber.

“Bad dream?”

He turns around to see the Jedi still sitting against the wall, wide awake and watching him with wide pale eyes. One of the thin scratchy blankets Din had found is around his shoulders, but the rest of the blankets and clothes were pushed aside. The Jedi had been picking at the bacta patches on his left side when Din woke. Din would say something but he can’t get the words out. He can’t stop staring at Luke.

The Jedi notices his silence and abandons the bandages to lean forward. “Hey, are you okay? I mean, it looked like you crawled through a sarlacc pit finding this ship.”

“Blasted my way out of a krayt dragon once,” Din manages to say. “And don’t pick that. I’m not the one who was nearly gored to death by that creature out there.”

“Figured that out, huh?” The Jedi leaves his bandages alone and instead starts picking at the tattered edges of the blanket. He looks defeated, shoulders slumping and head bowed as he pulls into himself. “Found my X-Wing, too?”

“Yes. At the bottom of the hill. I found the supplies you kept talking about in the cockpit. Where did you go? You were supposed to come back.”

The Jedi sighs. “I heard something in the woods and went to investigate.” He pantomimes the chase and ensuing fight deep in the woods near Cheen’s ship. “Found my way here but passed out before I could get into the medpacs. Guess I’m lucky you found me.”

“You could’ve died,” Din says flatly.

“I was healing myself… slowly.” The Jedi touches his lip, which Din sees is already nearly mended. The scratches on his face are fading away and the gash on his right temple is a faint scar. “Maybe too slowly.”

Din remembers Grogu healing Greef and the kid’s earlier attempts to heal him the night they first met. It looks like a complicated feat requiring great effort to achieve, and the Jedi was in no condition to attempt it. 

“Should’ve used the medpacs and saved your strength,” he says. “Your powers can’t fix everything.”

The Jedi dips his head in Din’s direction and then leans back against the wall, closing his eyes. “I know.”

Din watches the Jedi’s breathing slowly even out. Once he’s certain that Luke won’t be waking up for a while, he slowly gets up. Everything aches as he limps to the alcove to use the refresher. Afterward, he checks his chronometer but can only guess how long it’s been since he first came across Cheen’s ship. He returns to the Jedi’s side, slowly sits with a low groan, and opens a ration pack to eat. He places a second one in the Jedi’s lap and settles back against the wall, arms folded over his chest. He too closes his eyes and dozes while listening to the Jedi breathe.

He doesn’t remember what he dreams of this time but he swears he hears the kid burbling, laughter as bright as the stars. The Jedi stands before him, face shrouded under the cowl, and he tells Din that Grogu is asking for his permission but his attention isn’t on the kid and the hand he offers is to Din. Din wakes before he can decide what to do with it. He’d slumped over in his sleep and his neck is sore; he rubs it as he sits up and takes stock of his surroundings.

“I don’t understand how you sleep with your helmet on,” the Jedi muses. He’s also awake and picking forlornly at his ration. “I miss real food.”

“Yeah,” Din says. He studies the Jedi, searching for signs of illness, but sees none; some color has returned to the Jedi’s face and his eyes are bright and alert. “How are you feeling?”

The Jedi shrugs with maddening nonchalance. “What if I told you this wasn’t the worst thing to happen to me? Ever been to Hoth? Got attacked by a wampa once. That was not a great day.”

Din tilts his head. “Why were you even on Hoth?”

“The war,” the Jedi says vaguely. “Anyway. I could be better but I could also be a lot worse. Glad you found me when you did. But, um, what about Cheen?”

“We agreed it would be in his best interest to stay put while I went out looking for you,” Din says. “If he does manage to get away, I’ll just find him again.”

“I’m sure he’s smart enough to know that.”

Din doubts this optimistic opinion of their Rodian companion. He knows Cheen prefers to live but he also knows Cheen thought kicking a beskar helmet at full force was a smart thing to do. “We’ll see.”

They lapse into silence. The Jedi finishes eating and tosses the refuse aside. Din watches him close his eyes and wonders when will be a good time to talk about the transmission waiting at his X-Wing.

“I’m still awake,” the Jedi says, cracking an eye open. 

No time like now. “I saw the transmission.”

The Jedi opens both eyes. “The… what?”

“The transmission. In your X-Wing. You didn’t notice?”

He shakes his head. “No. It must’ve come in after I already left the X-Wing but before the storm came. And I never got a chance to get inside the cockpit before, well.” He gestures at himself. He then gives Din a scrutinizing look. “You saw it? Who sent it? What was it about?”

“Someone was trying to warn you about Vos-3,” Din says. “Your sister, I think. She said she spoke to someone named Tekka-”

“Did she?” The Jedi smiles fondly. “Wonder what made her think to ask him….”

Din thinks about the dropped words, the missing pieces of Luke’s sister’s plea for him to return immediately. He thinks about her reassuring Grogu. “Can the Jedi predict the future?”

The Jedi ponders and his answer is slow, cautious. “Yes, but it isn’t so simple. We can have visions of the past and the future, but they’re not absolute and are difficult to interpret. They can mean many things. The danger with these visions is that we can… interpret them poorly. We read them wrong and react instead of stopping to think, and either the vision doesn’t come to pass but at a great cost, or it does and it’s by your hand.”

He keeps flexing and clenching his right hand, the cybernetic one hidden under a black glove. Din wonders if one of these so-called visions was responsible for the loss of his flesh-and-blood one. 

“Why do you ask?” the Jedi wonders.

Din thinks again on what Luke’s sister told Grogu. The kid must’ve had one of those visions, which was why she reached out to Tekka and sent the transmission. “I think the kid saw what was going to happen if you went to Vos-3. That’s why your sister sent her message.”

There’s pride in the Jedi’s smile and eyes as he nods. “Grogu is incredibly strong with the Force, and he’s only gotten stronger since he came to me. In some ways, he knows much more than I do. I suppose that comes with spending part of his life at the Jedi temple on Coruscant and training with the masters there. But, uh, don’t tell him that.”

It’s hard not to laugh at the absurdity of someone who probably hasn’t seen three decades trying not to be upstaged by a fifty-year-old child. He grins, knowing the Jedi can’t see his face. “I give you my word.”

The Jedi’s smile is so bright that it’s hard to imagine he was so gray and still just hours ago. “I’m only half-serious. Grogu has been telling me about his life there and what his masters taught him. He knows how things used to be.” His smile fades. “Some of those things that I know will change.”

“Like the whole thing with attachments?”

The Jedi nods. “I’m not just trying to restore the Jedi Order. I want to reform it, too. You take all the wisdom and all the mistakes, and try to build something better. That’s what the New Republic is trying to do and what I’m going to do.”

Din huffs, thinking about the New Republic patrol that hounded him and even pestered Cara and Greef. “All the Republic ever did was make me crash on Maldo Kreis.”

“Sorry to hear that. But the Republic is trying. It’s a lot of work undoing everything the Empire did… and they did a lot with the time they had. We know there are still holdouts in the Outer Rim, remnants loyal to the emperor like the one led by Moff Gideon. It’ll be years before every last trace of them is gone, but they will be gone. I can promise you that.”

“Then Grogu will finally be safe,” Din says.

“Yes.”

The Jedi speaks so earnestly and with such conviction that Din could almost believe him. The Jedi speaks of the war, of Hoth, of Jedi visions that might’ve led to his cybernetic hand, of the Jedi Order’s undoing at its own hands, of the trauma the Empire inflicted on the galaxy, but he also speaks of rebuilding, of hope for a better and brighter future for this young Republic and for Grogu. If Din lets himself believe the Jedi, then perhaps he can find some peace, too.

 _“Don’t be a stranger,”_ Bo-Katan whispers at the back of his mind.

He clenches his jaw and his hands. No, there will be no peace for Din Djarin. He still has to reckon with the Darksaber and with the purged Mandalorian homeworld, a planet he never knew.

“Is something wrong?” the Jedi asks.

Din realizes he's been silent for longer than is comfortable. “It’s—it’s nothing. I was just thinking.”

“What about?”

He doesn’t want to talk about the Darksaber so he pivots back to the transmission. “Your sister. She mentioned you by name.”

“Did she.” It is not a question.

The Jedi’s body language is peculiar. He goes completely still and his expression becomes guarded. Is he hiding something? Din thinks about Cara’s reluctance to come with him to Nevarro and how uneasy she was with her new position within the New Republic ranks. She had done things she was not proud of and would not talk about, and the same must be true of the Jedi, of Luke. The rise and fall of the Empire brought out the best and worst in everyone Din crossed paths with, including himself. He was and is a bounty hunter and feels no shame for what he’s done to survive. The Jedi has nothing to fear from him, but he won’t push the matter. That is for the Jedi to decide.

“If you don’t want to give me your name, then that’s fine. I won’t say anything,” Din says. “It just seems… strange to finally hear it. You’ve always been ‘the Jedi’ to me.”

“I’m not just ‘the Jedi’,” the Jedi replies immediately. He slowly relaxes. “I… guess you can have my name. Wait, no, you _should_ have my name. You entrusted me with Grogu’s care. His future. That’s… that’s such a selfless, trusting thing to do, and I wouldn’t give you my name? And we’ve been stuck on this damn rock for… how many days now? Eleven? Twelve? And I even kissed you, so-”

“Luke,” Din says.

He can hear the breath catch in the Jedi’s throat, can see how his eyes widen in surprise. Din doesn’t know why it’s such a shock when he just explained Luke’s sister had named him in her message.

“I, uh, yeah, that’s my name,” the Jedi says. He rubs the back of his neck. “We can start with that.”

“Is there more I should know?”

Luke shrugs. “I’d rather not. Sometimes it’s… nice to just be ‘Luke’ to people.”

What kind of service record does Luke have in the Rebellion? Cara might’ve heard of him; Din should ask her when he returns—no, he should let Luke decide what to tell him and when. The Jedi has his reasons for not wanting to be recognized and Din will respect that.

“Okay,” he says. “We can start with that, Luke.”

He’s the one trying to breathe, heart beating at a maddening suffocating pace, when Luke smiles gratefully and says, “Thank you.”

* * *

After another hour passes, Luke announces he can walk now and they’d better get back to the temple before Cheen tries something. Din is doubtful the Jedi can heal himself so quickly even with the aid of bacta, but Luke gets to his feet without help and looks defiantly at Din while walking to the refresher without a limp. Din shakes his head and starts cramming the satchel with every medpac and ration he can find on the ship. They can’t fly the barge over to the temple on their own; it’s just the two of them and Din doesn’t like the prospect of being struck out of the sky by the thunderstorm.

He goes to the cockpit to power down the ship and shut off the engines, and pauses at the sight of several data sticks sitting on the control panels. He swipes them; they might contain information on Cheen’s client, which would be useful to the Jedi… and to the guild. He returns to the cargo hold to see Luke searching through the satchel’s supplies. The young Jedi looks up at him with a wry smile and then sees the data sticks in his hand.

“They might have something on Cheen’s client,” Din says and puts them in the knapsack.

“I see,” Luke says neutrally. He picks up his cloak and sweeps it over his shoulders. “I’m ready.”

Din hooks the beskar staff to his back, slings the heavy knapsack over his shoulder, and hands Luke his pistol. “If you start feeling tired, say so.”

“I feel fine,” the Jedi says. “Really.”

Din knows how exhausted Grogu was after mending Greef’s arm following the reptavian attack. He doubts the Jedi is actually fine but he’ll let Luke surprise him. He goes to the panel and opens the ramp. Cold damp air bursts into the ship and around them, followed by the sounds of relentless rain and thunder. A few seconds after the ramp hits the muddy ground, lightning flashes.

Luke heaves a heavy sigh. “Never thought I’d say this but I could use some sun right now. Two, even.”

“One sun is more than enough.”

“Spoken like a man who’s been to Tatooine,” Luke remarks with a strangely wistful tone that only furthers Din’s suspicions that the Jedi had come from a desert planet very much like Tatooine, if not the planet itself.

He hums noncommittally while scanning their surroundings. He finds very faint heat signatures high up in the canopy, sheltering in the trees. They seem both disinclined to move and too small to be of any real danger compared to the beast Luke had struck down. There isn’t any other worrisome movement in the area and Din hopes the long walk back to the temple stays uneventful. He already has a Jedi to keep alive and a Rodian to watch for, and could do without more obstacles.

They still linger on the ramp, hesitant to step back out into the rain. He looks at the back of the Jedi’s pale head and is suddenly reminded of the morning Luke left the temple to bring back supplies from his X-Wing. He went swiftly and with sureness in his step, and didn’t give Din time to react, to say or do… something. Not that Din would know what to say but he already spent a day wallowing in thoughts about what the Jedi, what _Luke_ is becoming to him. But what good are thoughts if he doesn’t act on them?

He wonders what his face must look like under the helmet, and he’s suddenly very glad for it as he licks his upper lip and says, “Luke.”

The Jedi turns around quickly. “Yes? Did you forget something? Did I?”

He shakes his head and takes two steps down the ramp until he’s standing nearly toe to toe with the Jedi. He searches Luke’s face, hoping the intent is clear; he’d only shared this gesture with others in the covert. He never did with Grogu and regrets it, knows he will be making it up when they meet again. And he doesn’t make the same mistake twice.

As steadily as his voice will allow it, he asks, “May I?”

Confused yet hopeful, Luke nods. “Sure, I guess. I mean, yes.”

Din takes a deep breath and then presses his helmeted forehead to Luke’s. He hears a very, very quiet, “ _Oh_ ,” and feels the Jedi lean into it as if he does understand what it means. Luke has such an uncanny ability to read Din’s silence and must know how important, how _intimate_ this gesture is for people whose creed forbids removal of one’s helm in the presence of others.

There is one other thing. “I don’t know if Grogu told you, but my name is Din Djarin. I don’t give it to just anyone so-”

“Nobody else will know,” Luke promises. “Especially our Rodian friend.”

Oh, how his heart can burst. His voice only trembles slightly as he says, “Thank you.”

He’s reluctant to pull away but they have to go; the reasons why they’re even on this planet are sheltering in an ancient temple a half-day’s walk away. Luke is flush with color when they step back and he can’t stop smiling while pulling the cowl over his head. The image stays with Din as they leave the repurposed barge, stepping out into the storm and following the fading trail left by Cheen’s crew back to the abandoned town and the temple watching over it.

The rain is nonstop and the droplets as heavy as ever, yet they seem to slide off the Jedi’s head and shoulders. In fact, it seems the only parts of him getting wet are his boots, which become caked in mud and grass the further they go. Din stays vigilant for roaming beasts and watches the Jedi carefully. Luke acts unaffected by his injuries but Din knows it’s only a matter of time before they catch up to him.

They must’ve walked for a couple hours before Luke stumbles over a gnarled lump of tree roots. Din grabs him by the arm to steady him and frowns when he sees the Jedi wincing and rubbing his right leg.

“That was close,” Luke says. “Thanks for the catch.”

“Do you need to stop?”

Luke shakes his head. “I don’t want to waste any time out here. There isn’t much in the way of shelter.”

“That’s not an answer.”

He rolls his eyes. “No, I don’t.”

Din lets it go but stays close to the Jedi as they continue through the forest. The already dark sky grows dim as day turns to night. They’re going to lose what little light they have, so Din searches his belt for a light and attaches it to his helmet. A beam of light illuminates their way forward, pushing back against the encroaching dark and the gray mist settling on the ground.

“Are Mandalorians always prepared for every situation?” Luke wonders.

“I left my jetpack on my ship. I’m still regretting it.”

Luke whirls around. “You have a jetpack?” He then tilts his head, thinking. “That bounty hunter I ran into had a jetpack….”

“And you got away?”

The Jedi shrugs and faces forward. “Like I said, it was luck.”

They’re leg-weary by the time they reach the edge of the flooded town. Din is exhausted. His hands and feet feel like blocks of ice and the satchel of supplies is a heavy weight on his shoulder. His attention is on Luke, though, who can’t hide that he’s favoring his right leg and having some trouble catching his breath. His expression is grimmer and his face is taking on that unhealthy pallor. Din needs to get him back to the temple, fast.

The floodwaters around the town are still treacherous, surging and frothing as they rush downward from some higher ground. This time, Luke doesn’t pretend otherwise when Din grabs him by the upper arm to keep him upright; he loops his arm around Din’s waist and doesn’t let go as they wade through knee-deep water. The Jedi temple looms in the distance, a shadowy shape framed by mist and lightning. Din can’t see any light from within and hopes Cheen didn’t run off. The last thing he needs right now is to chase a handcuffed Rodian who really should know better.

“He’s there,” Luke says through chattering teeth. The rain is starting to soak into his cloak. “Forgot how deep the water is.”

Din slowly pulls them through the currents, gaze fixed on the temple. The rain and the flood try to drag them under as they ford past the stone buildings. Lightning crackles overhead, an ever-present threat, but Din keeps his head down and doesn’t stop moving forward. Finally, they drag themselves out of the water and stagger inside the temple. There is light, a very small fire made of smoldering branches. Cheen sits near it in a miserable huddle, head bowed against his cuffed arms. Empty ration packs litter the ground. His knapsack of Jedi texts sits nearby, untouched.

“Hey,” Din says. His voice rasps and hisses, and he clears his throat before trying again. “Hey. Cheen.”

The Rodian makes a disgruntled noise and raises his head. His large eyes stare balefully at Din and then at Luke.

“Well, well, well, look what the tooka dragged in,” the Rodian mutters, though Din can see his tense posture relaxing. “You two look like you had an adventure out there. Me? Stuck here desperately feeding this fire, walking up and down the stairs to stay warm and sane, and eating myself into a stupor because I have nothing better to do.”

Din sighs and drops the damp knapsack on the ground. “We found your ship.”

“You did? What did you—wait, are those my supplies? The ones I paid with my hard-earned credits?”

“Not anymore.” Din tosses a couple packs at the outraged Rodian. “These are.”

The Rodian then stares at Luke, who is listing to the side and hasn’t let go of Din. “What happened to you?”

Din stares at him. Cheen must feel the weight of it because he turns his gaze to Din and shrugs. “Just saying. What happened out there? Did he even get to his X-Wing?”

“Not now,” Din says and helps Luke sit down as close to the fire as possible. “Do we have more wood?”

Cheen points at a pile of damp branches and brittle salvage from the other floors. “Almost drowned fishing these out of the water with my cuffed hands. You’re welcome.”

Din sighs and feeds the small fire, coaxing it to spread and burn brighter and hotter. He pulls a few medpacs out of the satchel and goes to Luke’s side. He looks down at the Jedi’s outstretched right leg; the gash on his thigh is visible through the torn fabric and bleeding slowly. 

“Should’ve waited for the bacta to finish its job,” he says while kneeling and opening the medpac. “Hold still.”

Luke nods mutely and watches him clean and coat the wound in bacta before wrapping his thigh with strips of sterile fabric. Din then checks the deep scratches on his left side; the area around the wounds is inflamed and he opens another medpac. Once he’s done, he tries to get up but the Jedi grabs him by the wrist.

“Don’t leave yet,” Luke whispers.

Confused, Din replies, “I’m not going anywhere.” He then notices the Jedi patting the ground next to him. “Oh.”

He leans his beskar staff against the wall and sits down next to the Jedi, who immediately curls up against his right shoulder. Luke wraps his cloak tightly around himself and closes his eyes. Din looks down at the Jedi’s damp blond head and something strange and hot curls tightly in his chest. He slowly leans back against the wall and exhales, letting tension slip away. They made it back, they have supplies to carry them through this storm for a while longer, and now he can _breathe_.

He tilts his head in Cheen’s direction and sees the Rodian staring back at him and the Jedi.

“You’re a goner now, Mando,” Cheen says quietly, for once without a hint of malice or mockery.

Din doesn’t answer. He’s already asleep.


	5. The Sky

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did some art for this story.

Din regrets waking up. He hurts from head to toe; his joints ache and his head throbs with a persistent headache. Swallowing is painful and his neck is so stiff he can’t turn his head. It takes a long time for him to force his eyes open. He blinks blearily through the visor at a gray sky and heavy rain framed by the temple’s entrance. A silhouette stands before it, staring outside. Cheen heaves a sigh and hangs his head as lightning flashes. Din imagines it’ll be the first of many today.

He feels very warm and he doesn’t know why until he finally registers the weight on his right shoulder. He slowly turns his head and tilts it down to see the Jedi slumbering by his side, curled up under the black cloak with his head resting on Din’s upper arm. The cuts on Luke’s face and lip are gone, and there is a very faint red line on his right temple where a gash used to be. Din wonders if the same is true of the Jedi’s other, more severe injuries.

“I’m fine,” Luke mumbles. “I can feel you staring.”

Din huffs and slowly leans his head back against the wall. He rasps, “Somehow, I don’t believe you.”

The Jedi doesn’t answer. He’s asleep again.

Cheen shuffles over to the fire and sits down awkwardly across from Din and Luke. The Rodian pretends not to see them while dragging over the knapsack of supplies and looking inside. After a few seconds, he shakes his head and pulls out a ration.

“At least I won’t starve for a few more days. Did you take _everything_ from my ship?”

Din sighs. “Nobody is coming back for it. Supplies would go to waste.”

“Fine. And what are… these….” Cheen fumbles awkwardly with his cuffed hands and pulls out a data stick. He stares at it and then at Din. “Did you see what’s inside?”

Rather than answer, Din asks, “What’s in them?”

The Rodian hems and haws while turning over the stick in his hand. He then drops it back in the satchel and opens his ration. “Information. That’s what data sticks are for.”

“On _what_?”

“I don’t know!” Cheen exclaims, annoyed. “But I’ll tell you this—first one I stuck in the computer? Brought me here.”

Does that mean every data stick he swiped from the cockpit holds coordinates to more lost Jedi temples? Din looks down at Luke but he is still asleep. He heard nothing.

“I’ll bet you,” Cheen says, “that if you take these sticks back to the guild, Karga can get all the information he needs on my client. That’ll get me out of trouble, right?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Din says. He shifts about carefully, trying to find a better position without straining himself or waking the Jedi. “You really don’t know who your client is?”

Cheen groans. “No, I kriffing don’t. How many times do I have to tell you until it gets through your thick beskar bucket? But see, this isn’t so much about _who_ my client is. It’s about who _else_ my client reached out to. You really think I’m the first and only one to go behind Karga’s back? If these sticks give him more names, he’ll go easy on me. He has to. Look what he did for you.”

Din shrugs. He couldn’t very well explain that his new deal with Greef began when Grogu saved his life. “You can take it up with him.”

Talking is exhausting. He closes his eyes and then realizes he doesn’t have the strength to open them again. As he drifts off to sleep, he hears Cheen grumbling, “I can’t be that boring….”

When he wakes again, it isn’t because he has rested long enough. He is exhausted but he also desperately needs water. He sits forward with a gasp. His head spins and he can’t get a bearing on his surroundings.

“Here.”

Something pushes into Din’s hands. He looks down at the opened canteen, then quickly tilts his helmet up to gulp down its contents. The water tastes stale and tinny, but it is also cool and wet, and washes away the tacky grime lodged in the back of his throat. It is such a relief that he nearly drops the canteen but water is precious and he clings to it until his throat is drenched.

“And here I thought Mando didn’t need water,” Cheen says. “Or food. He eats, right?”

Luke shushes him. 

Din lets the helmet drop back into place, licking water droplets off his lip, and watches Luke pry the empty canteen out of his hand. He turns his head to the Jedi, who’s still sitting next to him and looking back with a tired smile. There are shadows under Luke’s pale eyes and deep lines on his face, but he is awake and alert, and that is all that matters to Din.

“How-” Din clears his throat. “How long was I out?”

“The whole day,” Cheen says loudly before Luke opens his mouth. “Both of you were out from light to dark. Had to prod you a few times to make sure you didn’t up and die on me. Last thing I need are dead bodies.”

Din sighs. He really hopes Cheen didn’t actually poke him with a stick. Instead he turns his attention to the bandages around Luke’s right leg. “Should get that looked at.”

“Already did.” The Jedi prods his leg and only looks mildly uncomfortable. “I told you, I’m fine. I’ll be up in no time.” He gestures at their supplies and a ration pack tumbles out of the satchel. Heaving a full-body sigh, Luke leans forward and picks it up. “I might need a day or two.”

He drops it into Din’s lap and then closes his eyes and turns his head away. “Cheen.”

The Rodian grumbles under his breath while pointedly turning his back on them. “... kriffing Mandalorians.”

Din looks between Luke and Cheen uncertainly. They apparently had a conversation while he was asleep and he wonders what the Jedi said to get Cheen to listen. But if he thinks about it, everything Luke has ever done either stumped or terrified the Rodian; it must not have taken much to convince Cheen to do anything. And then Din almost forgets that he hasn’t eaten and that’s why his stomach is starting to hurt because _Luke deliberately carved out space for his creed here_. 

He still only pushes his helmet up halfway and he eats quickly just to get it over with. After tossing the trash into the fire, he turns to the Jedi and finds Luke is asleep again, arms folded tightly and head bowed. Din looks out at the end of the hall and watches lightning crackle across the sky. The rain is as persistent as ever, filling in the gaps between the crackle of fire and his own breaths.

“You remember what the sky looks like?” Cheen says loudly while still facing the other way. “Because I sure don’t. Kriffing storm.”

He shakes his head. “You can turn around now.”

“No, I think I like it better this way. Don’t have to watch you make faces with the Jedi.”

“You can’t even see my face.”

Cheen laughs harshly. “Exactly. Then, as if he thinks Din can’t hear him, “Laserbrain.”

Din gives up. Instead, he gets to his feet. It takes far more effort than he realizes and he staggers, knees threatening to buckle. He leans heavily against the wall, watching the floor sway until it makes his stomach turn. He closes his eyes and waits for it to settle and for the ground to feel solid before lurching forward, hand still touching the wall for support. At the threshold, he looks back but Luke is still asleep and Cheen is refusing to give him any attention. He holds his breath and takes his helmet off, then splashes frigid rainwater on his face until he feels somewhat alive. He blinks water out of his eyes and looks up at the dark, clouded sky. He tries to remember what stars look like.

The stormclouds simmer with lightning. He wipes excess water off his face, puts his helmet back on, and limps back to Luke’s side. He looks at Cheen, who’d fallen asleep sprawled out on the cold hard floor, and then sits next to the Jedi and looks out at the storm.

* * *

Luke decides to go up to the fourth floor to meditate. Din thinks he shouldn’t move at all but Luke insists it’ll help his body heal faster, so Din follows him up the stone steps and then down the hall into the ritual room. Once Luke steps up onto the dais, facing the thundering storm and the town, rocks start lifting off the ground. Din takes that as his cue to leave.

As he turns away, he tells the Jedi, “Don’t overdo it.”

“I know what I’m doing, Din,” Luke says softly.

He freezes, breath hitching and heart pounding. The last time anyone said his name, it was as a show of power and told him exactly who Moff GIdeon was. Today, he hears it as it was once spoken and he doesn’t know how to handle it. His name isn’t just a history, a memory, a secret, or a weapon anymore. He makes himself relax his hands and his shoulders, and clears his throat.

“Just… say something if you get too tired,” Din manages to say and walks away.

At the stairs, he considers going back down to the first floor but after losing an entire day recovering from the long trek through the woods, he is itching to do _something_. He takes the stairs up to the fifth floor and looks around the dim hallway with the abandoned rooms and piles of debris. He takes his light out and starts down the corridor to search for the next area to excavate.

An hour, perhaps two, passes before Luke joins him. Din is moving a piece of collapsed wall to the side to see if there’s anything buried under it and rocks start lifting from the top of the pile. He pauses, hand in midair, and then looks up at the Jedi standing in the hall, gloved hand outstretched and slowly moving the pieces aside. Luke smiles and walks into the room, showing no signs of pain.

“I had a feeling you’d be up here.”

“Your powers didn’t tell you?” Din asks while crouching down and trying to wiggle his hand under the rubble. Unsuccessful, he starts moving more rocks off of the pile.

“That’s the feeling.” The Jedi wiggles more stone away and they tumble out of the room into the hall. He then drops his hand and exhales. “I shouldn’t overextend myself.”

“Then don’t. Just assume I’m up here or down below with Cheen.”

“That’s not what I mean. It’s not... difficult to find you.”

Din reaches under the pile again. His fingertips touch something that doesn’t feel like cold, hard stone. If only there was friction to move it within his grasp. “What does that mean?”

“I, ah, I mean.” The Jedi huffs and scrubs at the back of his head. “I have an easier time finding you than Cheen.” Luke abruptly crouches down next to Din. “This whole planet is noisy. It’s chaos. Wild. I can almost understand why these people left. The Force is… unsettling here. But if my attention turns to you, everything goes still.”

Din can’t reach whatever it is he felt but now it doesn’t matter to him. He sits back on his heels, brushing dust off his hand and trying to understand what Luke is saying. “What?”

“I mean….” Luke taps the floor with his fingertips. “It’s like a disturbance in the Force, but the opposite. Right now, Vos-3 is a storm and you’re a well. Or a radio tower. Maybe I’m getting it all mixed up.”

Din doesn’t know how a well compares to a storm, but he can definitely understand the importance of a radio tower. “I’m… something you can focus on because the… Force is overwhelming here.”

Luke has to think about it. He then smiles and it is bright and warm. Din has to look away. “Yes. That. Maybe it’s just this planet. These storms, they weren’t here originally or no one would’ve built this temple. They came later and nobody expected them. These people weren’t prepared. Something unbalanced the Force here and now Vos-3 is mostly forgotten.”

“Do you know what happened?”

Luke shakes his head. “No. Nothing I read gives me any ideas. Maybe we’ll never know. All we can do is find whatever they left behind and take them somewhere safe.”

He looks at the rubble and then reaches out with his left hand. More stone lifts from the pile and floats away to drop elsewhere. Din watches the pile slowly shrink and then notices that Luke’s hand is shaking and he’s grimacing with effort.

“I thought you said you shouldn’t overdo it.”

“I know what I said,” Luke replies stubbornly. He manages to move a third of the pile to the side before dropping his hand. “That should help.”

He gets to his feet and stumbles. Din leaps up to catch him, hands wrapping around the Jedi’s shoulders. Luke grips his arms tightly while catching his breath; he is shaking and Din decides that he’s done enough for the day. 

“You don’t listen to yourself much, do you?” Din asks while leading him out of the room. He tries to go back to the stairs but Luke digs his heels in.

“I just need to rest for a few minutes,” he says. Din stares at him. “Really.”

Din considers the stubborn set of his jaw and sighs, shaking his head. “Fine. You can sit there and not use your powers.”

He tilts his head at a spot along the wall that’s clear of debris. Luke nods but is slow to let go of Din while sidling over to the spot. He sits and leans back against the wall, hands clenching and unclenching, and looks up at Din. 

“I’m fine.”

“Don’t use your powers,” Din says. “I mean it.”

“I know.”

“Luke.”

The Jedi looks at him sharply. Even with such sparse dim light, Din can see how quickly Luke’s pale eyes go dark. Then Luke closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. When he looks at Din again, his eyes are that light color again. Blue, if Din decides to take his helmet off in front of the Jedi again.

“Not used to hearing you say my name,” Luke admits and his voice is strangely soft and tentative. “All right. I’ll wait.”

He’ll just have to take the Jedi’s word for it. Din steps back inside the room, ignoring how painfully his heart beats against beskar as he crouches next to the significantly smaller pile of rubble. He carefully pulls and pushes at it to unearth whatever it was he felt. Something sticks out of the pile that isn’t stone and he pulls out a leatherbound text. He brushes off the dust and flips through the pages; they’re yellowing and the ink is faded in places, and he wonders how Luke can glean information from it. He gets up and goes to Luke, who sits forward with interest when he spots the book. Din holds it out to him and watches as he also goes through the pages; there are ranges of curiosity, confusion, and excitement that Din had never seen before on an expressive face, and yet.

“... is it useful?” Din eventually asks.

Luke turns a page and then looks up at him. “Yes, it is. Honestly, I can’t believe you found an entire shelf’s worth of these in the time we spent here.”

Din shrugs. He clears space next to the Jedi with his foot and slowly sits down. He is _tired_. “I need a break.”

He leans back and closes his eyes, listening to the sounds of pages turning and Luke humming inquisitively. He dozes off for a good ten or so minutes, never quite falling asleep since one can never be too careful. When he comes to, he sits up to avoid a sore spot in his upper back and then turns his head to see Luke is still reading. The Jedi focuses on each page with uncommon intensity, brow furrowed and teeth worrying his lip as he reads. Din almost finds it hard to believe this is the same person who eviscerated Imperial droids and fought him with such fervor. Then he thinks about Ahsoka, who sat quietly for long hours with Grogu and then destroyed the Calodan magistrate’s forces with graceful brutality. Are all Jedi like them?

“Like what?” Luke asks.

Din sighs inwardly. “Like you? Scholars one day, warriors the next?”

Luke hums while turning the page. “I suppose the old Order was like that, if everything I read and watched were true. But I don’t have a choice. If I don’t read, I’ll lose all of this knowledge, this history. But I like to think I’m better at learning by doing. It makes sense, in a way. Being a Jedi is also about using your body to move with the Force. It’s not just about, well, sorcery.”

“Is that what the meditating and sparring are for?”

Luke turns another page. “Yes.”

They lapse back into silence for a while longer. When Din glances at his chronometer, twenty minutes have come and gone. He’s ready to move to the next room. He nudges the Jedi and gets to his feet. Luke closes and tucks the book under his arm and follows Din without hesitation.

Din peers into the room and stares at collapsed shelves and disintegrating wood furniture. “Don’t do anything you shouldn’t do.”

Luke frowns. “Well-”

“I mean it.”

He doesn’t need any Force powers to feel the Jedi roll his eyes. “Fine.”

When they come back down to the first floor, they’re both covered in dust. Luke carries two texts and another small stone carving, a crude imitation of a six-legged creature that could be the shy beast Din once saw in the woods or the one that attacked Luke. Cheen, who’d been wandering around the hell dragging his feet through the dirt to spell out obscenities, stops in his tracks to watch them suspiciously. Luke goes right to his folded cloak where he sets their salvage down before dusting himself off, oblivious to the Rodian’s staring. Din stops in his tracks to look at Cheen, who makes a gesture with his hands that would’ve successfully expressed his thoughts if they weren’t cuffed and turns around to continue spelling out an insult in Huttese.

Hours later, while Din is disassembling Luke’s blaster pistol to clean off the blood and mud, Luke looks up from the text and cocks his head to the side. Din watches closely while snapping a cleaned piece back onto the grip.

“Do you hear something?” he asks.

Luke tilts his head the other way, eyes closing. After a few seconds, he says, “Listen.”

All Din hears is rain, though it isn’t as loud as he remembers it. He concentrates and then realizes that every raindrop is taking longer to fall. He glances at Cheen, who’d been peeling off the bandages around his mostly healed foot and is also listening.

“What am I listening for?” Din asks.

There is a distant rumble, thunder in the far distance. Luke is still listening, eyes closed, but Cheen just scoffs.

“It’s just more thunder. What else is new?”

“It’s not as close,” Din says. And then he realizes he’s seen far fewer instances of lightning today than in the past fourteen or so days. That can only mean one thing. “The storm is moving.”

Cheen frowns as more thunder booms, again in the distance. “I don’t believe you.”

“I think he’s right,” Luke says, opening his eyes. “Give it a day or two, and then we can finally leave.”

There is an odd wistfulness to the Jedi’s words even though he looks relieved by the thought, the idea that the skies will finally clear. Luke resumes reading but he keeps worrying his bottom lip and fidgets with both his hands and his feet.

Din would be wondering why the Jedi is distressed about the storm finally moving on, but he feels that same, strange unease. He should be _relieved_. The storm will finally be gone, freeing them from the confines of this temple. He can finally fulfill his contract with Greef, finish paying off for the parts to make his new gunship fly, and leave Nevarro under his own power to search for the survivors of his covert, for the Armorer whose guidance he desperately needs. He can finally keep away from Bo-Katan until he is ready to face her.

But all he feels is dread.

Later, much later, when the sky is black and the sound of rainfall more pronounced and pervasive, Luke says, “You’ve been quiet.”

Din shrugs. He watches the flicker of firelight on the walls of the hall and then looks at the entryway. Faint warm light reflects in the streams of rainwater, creating a glistening curtain holding them inside the temple. He hears the Jedi shift and feels a weight lean into his side. He stiffens for a moment and then relaxes and leans back.

“You’re probably relieved I’ll finally be back with Grogu,” Luke muses, voice muffled and quiet. “I miss him. It’s never a dull day when I’m teaching him.”

Din huffs. “I know what that’s like. Learned real fast that I should never leave him alone on the ship. Not that he’d let me go out by myself.”

“He cares about you. You saved his life, you encouraged him to reconnect with the Force, and you led him back to the Jedi. To me.”

“Where he belongs,” Din says. The words sound hollow even though they’re the right ones.

“Maybe,” Luke replies. “He asked me once if he could find you through the Force, no matter how far apart you two are.”

That sounds strange and impossible, but the intent behind the question is a comfort. It warms Din and also makes it hard for him to breathe. He swallows against the lump in the back of his throat. “Could he?”

The Jedi hums thoughtfully and Din can feel it. “He needs practice. A lot of practice. Finding a single person in the whole galaxy can be… difficult.”

“Can you?” Din asks curiously.

Luke shrugs. “If I focus, I can feel my sister no matter where she is. But something about this planet, this storm, keeps me from reaching out. It holds me here. I noticed this when I was meditating. All I could focus on were all the living things on Vos-3. On Cheen. On you.”

He hesitates, then softly says, “Especially you.”

There’s a pounding in Din’s head and he realizes he’s holding his breath. He forces himself to breathe out, to keep breathing. There is an ache in his chest, the thought of impending solitude once they part ways. The strange illusion of his time on this planet is fracturing, shattering, and though he is finally glad to leave, a part of him wonders what it could be like to stay here with Luke, lost to the rest of the galaxy.

* * *

It’s still raining.

Din stares at the gray mist and the relentless downpour while screwing the cap back on a half-empty canteen. He doesn’t notice the Jedi standing in front of him until Luke prods him with the beskar staff. He looks up and there’s a hopeful look on Luke’s face that pulls him to his feet without a second thought.

“Is that really a good idea?” he asks while taking back the staff. “Your leg-”

“Is fine,” Luke replies while rolling his shoulders and neck. “No bacta, no bandages. See?”

“Your side-”

“Is also fine. I’m fine, I promise.” Luke strides past Cheen, who is still half-asleep and muttering that it is too early for him to start dealing with them. He looks over his shoulder at Din. “Really.”

Din follows him warily, keeping the staff pointed to the ground. “If you get tired, you need to say something.”

Luke sighs and unhooks his lightsaber from his belt. He tosses the hilt from hand to hand, expression pensive. The air prickles even through the filters on Din’s helmet. 

“I’ll say something,” Luke says and activates the green-lit blade. “But I sat around for two days, and could really use some exercise. Just go easy on me.”

Din obliges. He takes a defensive position and waits for Luke to make the first move and guide the fight. Luke closes his eyes, takes several deep breaths, and then lunges forward. Din easily deflects the lightsaber and slides to the side out of the lightsaber’s reach. He watches and waits, then blocks another strike. The Jedi feints his counter, twists around, and strikes again. Din blocks it with his vambrace, pushes Luke back, and waits for the next attack. Luke lunges, lightsaber arcing through the dark; Din blocks it and redirects the blade, letting it slide down the beskar in a bright blaze. The beskar vibrates and warms under Din’s hands and he shoves the Jedi away before the metal grows too hot. He shifts back into a defensive position.

The exercise goes at this push-pull pace for what feels like hours but is probably not even half of one. Sweat drips into Din’s eyes; his lungs burn, his muscles ache, and his blood wants to sing. He blocks another blow, then twists the staff to wrest the lightsaber free. Luke stumbles and he freezes, worried he overdid it. That is a mistake; Luke uses the momentum to strike hard and fast, knocking the staff out of his hands. Din blocks the next blow with his vambraces, then with his pauldron. He activates his flamethrower and fire bursts forth hot and fast, pushing the Jedi back. Din grabs his staff and then frowns when the flamethrower sputters and dies.

“Dank farrik,” he mutters. He’s out of fuel.

He blocks the lightsaber with his vambrace, then with the staff. He darts out of the way of another strike and redirects the blade. All of his focus is on keeping pace with the Jedi and that is his real undoing. He collides with the wall and freezes at the presence of the lightsaber thrumming just inches from his neck where no beskar protects it. He lets the beskar staff drop on the floor.

“You win,” Din says hoarsely.

He can’t seem to catch his breath, not while Luke is staring at him with such wild, stormy eyes. Sweat drips down his flushed face, which is aglow with the light from his blade. He looks like such a wild thing, untouchable and relentless as the storm outside, yet he holds the lightsaber so carefully that Din knows it could never hurt him. 

“So I did,” Luke says but he doesn’t lower the lightsaber. He doesn’t step away.

Din should say something. Anything. No words will come to him. His gaze--and his helmeted head—tilt downward every so slightly to Luke’s mouth and he thinks about the kisses, wet with rain and so warm and sweet. He closes his eyes and takes a shuddering breath.

At the other end of the hall, Cheen loudly says, “Will you moof-milkers stop being so kriffing weird? Either take his head off or don’t, Jedi. Make up your mind!”

The lightsaber falls away and Luke steps back. Din opens his eyes and sees the Jedi looking away, face flushed even darker as he hooks the lightsaber back onto his belt. He drags his hand down his face, glances sideways at Din, and then walks to the end of the hall. Din stares after him, wondering if he should follow but not knowing if he can. Instead, he leaves the beskar staff where it fell and goes up the stairs to the fourth floor. He steps up to the ledge and stares out at the mist-shrouded forest, then pulls his helmet off and breathes in the cold wet air. He sees lightning flash near the distant mountains but doesn’t hear thunder. He looks up and wonders if the thick cloud cover is starting to thin in places as the storm sweeps away to ravage another part of the planet. 

Din drenches his head with water and rubs his face clean. His hand lingers on his lips and he wonders, he just _wonders_ , what will happen once the storm passes and they go their separate ways. When they meet again, will they be strangers again, allies, or…?

When he comes back down to the ground floor, Luke is telling Cheen he suspects the storm will be gone tomorrow. He looks up at Din and stops speaking mid-sentence, then gets to his feet. He stops Din with a hand on his upper arm.

“I need to meditate for a bit,” he says. “Fifth floor?”

Din nods. Luke opens his mouth but hesitates and looks away. His fingers curl against Din’s arm and then he lets go and slips past. Din turns to watch the Jedi disappear up the stairs, taking two at a time, and then faces Cheen. The Rodian is rubbing his face with both hands and muttering darkly.

“What was that?”

Cheen shakes his head and turns away from Din. “Get me off this kriffing rock before I explode.”

Din rolls his eyes, sighs, and sits to go through everything that was salvaged from both the temple and Cheen’s grounded barge. If the storm really does move on by tomorrow, then he doesn’t need to count how many days their supply lasts but one can never be too careful. After, he peers into the Rodian’s knapsack, which is nearly bursting with Jedi texts and journals. Something nestled deep inside the satchel glints in the faint light and Din remembers what else he found here. He takes out the strange crystalline cube and holds it up to the fire, turning it this way and that to study the play of firelight on its surfaces and cloudy interior. The cube seems to glow and he can make out faint carvings on the surfaces, but he can’t see what’s inside it. Perhaps it is a solid crystal, carefully carved and polished for some unknown reason or purpose.

“How much do you think that’ll bring the guild?” Cheen asks, staring at it over his shoulder. “Ancient Jedi crystal box from a planet nobody wants to visit because of these kriffing storms? Has to be worth a fortune.”

“It’s not for the guild and you know it,” Din says.

“You know what I was doing while you were out there nearly drowning while rescuing your Jedi? Imagining how many credits I’d get if I brought back that entire bag of books and the cube to the dropoff. I’d be swimming in credits, Mando. So many credits.”

Cheen sighs forlornly and hangs his head like that’ll garner some sympathy.

“You’ll be lucky to swim away with your life,” Din replies.

He considers the cube. Perhaps Luke will know what it is. He gets up and climbs the stairs to the fourth floor. At the end of the hall, he stops to stare at the sight of all the broken stones levitating, rotating in place slowly and deliberately. Luke had recovered quickly enough from his time in the woods, though he isn’t floating like he usually does when he meditates. He sits on top of his folded cloak, cross-legged with his hands on his knees and his back to the hall. Just about the only other thing not swept up in his powers is Din.

Din decides he’ll ask the Jedi later but just as he turns to leave, Luke glances over his shoulder. His eyes fall on the cube and he immediately unfolds himself. Din meets him halfway across the ritual room and holds out the cube.

“Where did you find this?” Luke asks. “The fifth floor? When?”

“You weren’t here,” Din says simply. “Do you know what it is?”

Luke takes it from his hand and the cube starts glowing softly from within its cloudy depths. His eyes light up. “It’s a holocron. The Jedi use these to store all kinds of information but they were either destroyed or stolen away after the Empire came into power. I’ve been finding these in vaults and private collections, but you found one here. Amazing. This is amazing.” He looks up at Din with a wide smile. “Starting to think I should hire you to find Jedi relics for me.”

“I’m not cheap,” Din says immediately. He then realizes what he just said and sighs. And catches a glimpse of the expression on Luke’s face. “Wait. You’re not serious-”

“I could be,” Luke says and there’s a mischievous gleam in his eyes. He leans forward and up to press his forehead to Din’s helmet and then walks back to the dais, cradling the holocron in his hands.

Din reaches the stairs before he has to stop and think about that entire conversation. No, it’s not so much the conversation as it is how quickly and readily Luke reciprocated a Mandalorian gesture of affection. His heart won’t stop pounding and he can’t breathe. He wants to rip his helmet off to find some relief in the cold temple air.

He looks back at the long hall; at the other end of it, Luke is probably inspecting the holocron and unlocking its many secrets. Din thinks about the enthusiasm on Luke’s face and the light in his eyes. He thinks about their quiet conversations about Vos-3, Luke’s powers, and Grogu. He thinks about the warm weight at his side when he sleeps and how comfortable it is becoming.

 _“You’re a goner now, Mando,”_ Cheen had said and he wasn’t even taunting Din at the time.

Din goes upstairs to the fifth floor and down the dim hall to the last untouched rooms. He sifts through debris and stone, stacks brittle wood to use later as fuel, and folds bits and pieces of fabric as he comes across them. He searches for texts, for little carvings, for anything made of polished crystal. All the while he listens for a Jedi’s soft treads but he hears nothing and sees nothing. Luke doesn’t come up looking for him and Din suspects it has everything to do with the holocron. That steels his resolve to find more but with each room he sweeps through, he comes out empty-handed and disappointed. He shouldn’t be surprised, though; the way Luke described these crystalline data sticks, they would’ve been too valuable for a Jedi to leave behind even when they’re fleeing a planet. 

In the very last room, he finds three old texts sitting next to shattered crystal shards on a stone shelf. He flips through each leatherbound book, deems them acceptable, and then stares at the shards. Unlike the cube, the pieces aren’t cloudy with mystery. They glint and gleam in the light mounted on Din’s helmet, pretty but useless and possibly even dangerous. He leaves them be.

He returns to the first floor coated in dust; he carries the books under one arm and a bundle of brittle wood under the other. Luke and Cheen are sitting across from each other, talking quietly. Luke is holding one of the data sticks Din swiped from the barge and he looks quite serious. They both stop talking and look up when Din drops the salvaged wood on top of their shrinking pile of fuel. Luke sees the texts and immediately gets to his feet.

“You found more?”

“Yes. These are all that are left,” Din says, handing them over. He tilts his head at the data stick. “What did I miss?”

“Oh, I was asking our Rodian friend what was in these,” Luke says. “He said the first one he picked brought him here. If his client wanted him to come here to raid a Jedi ruin, then there must be more coordinates to places sacred to the Jedi in the other sticks. You said these could have information on Cheen’ s client but I need to know where else the client wanted him to go. If they can help me locate more Jedi texts, more holocrons, more of _anything_ , then I have to take them with me.”

A part of Din thinks about the information the guild can pull from the data sticks. Cheen implied that his client had been using other bounty hunters behind Greef’s back and Din would be glad to help Greef quash any threats to the guild. But he would do anything to help Luke protect and teach Grogu how to master his connection to the Force. 

Luke studies his helmeted face and telling silence. “I can send you the data. Not the coordinates if there are any, but anything that can lead your guild to the client. Would that help?”

Cheen huffs. “You’re going to trust him to keep his word, Mando?”

“Hey, quiet,” Din says. “That’s fair. Send it to Marshal Cara Dune. She’s stationed on Nevarro.”

“Marshal? I thought you didn’t like the New Republic.”

Din shrugs. “I’ve known her since before she rejoined it. She was part of the rescue mission on Gideon’s ship.”

Luke tilts his head, frowning, and then has a revelation. He points at a spot under his left eye. “Alderaanian?”

“Yes.”

The Jedi nods in sober understanding. “I remember her. She shouldn’t be hard to find.”

“Do you want to know who the client is?” Din asks. “If they intercepted your communique with Tekka, then they know who you are. And if they know you, then they’ll know about the kid.”

Luke frowns and his gaze darts to a very confused Cheen. “You’re right. I know people who can-”

Cheen loudly clears his throat. “If the New Republic is getting involved in this, leave me out of it. All of it. I wasn’t here.”

“Your client is the concern here, not you,” Din says. “Karga will deal with you.”

The Rodian makes an outraged sound and he sighs. He also tells Luke, “Don’t tell them about me. Last thing I need are New Republic patrols chasing me around the Outer Rim.”

Luke arches an eyebrow. “What did you do?”

“You don’t want to know.”

The Jedi frowns at his evasive nonanswer but eventually nods and says, “All right. How about this—I take any information on Jedi ruins and temples from the data sticks and send Marshal Dune the rest. I’m sure the guild has their grievances, too, so they can deal with the client.”

“And you?” Din asks. 

He speaks of Grogu, too, and Luke knows. He smiles and says, “I’ll be fine. I made a promise, remember?”

He knows that it is a promise Luke will keep and nods, sealing the deal. Luke drops the data sticks into the knapsack with the texts and the holocron, and goes back up the stairs with the new books in his arms. Din dusts himself off and grabs a canteen. It’s empty, as are all the other canteens. With a sigh, he unscrews one and goes to the entrance to fill it with rainwater. He looks out at the abandoned town, half shrouded in gray mist, and then narrows his eyes; he is either imagining things or the water level is dropping. The stormclouds still flicker with lightning but he hasn’t heard the rumbling thunder in hours. 

“You daydreaming, Mando?” Cheen calls out, snapping him out of his reverie.

He lifts his helmet up to drink from the nearly full canteen, then refills it and returns to their makeshift camp. He holds it out to Cheen, who snatches it and dinks for several seconds.

“You could make yourself useful and refill the other canteens,” Din suggests.

Cheen scoffs. “I already made myself useful. What did you think we were talking about before you interrupted?”

“You tell me.”

“My client. The reason why I turned on the guild. Gave your Jedi the whole sob story including Karga’s habit of playing favorites and leaving me with barely enough credits to cover my expenses. And my crew. Which you killed.”

“They attacked me first,” Din says.

“Your reputation precedes you, Mando. Knowing he sent _you_ to bring me back? I had to give it my best shot.”

“Uh huh,” he says, suspicious of the Rodian’s sudden honesty.

Cheen notices and sighs. He holds up his cuffed hands. “Look, I’m tired. I’m kriffing tired. No more broken bones but my foot still aches. I probably forgot how to use my arms. I lost my crew and ship while failing to complete a job. My ass is getting dragged back to Nevarro to answer to the guild. I had to watch you and your Jedi dance around each other like some insufferable Holonet drama for days. I never want to see another raincloud or hear another thunderstorm again. When this is all over, I’m moving to Tatooine to be a moisture farmer. I want to bake under the suns for the next twenty years.”

“Uh huh.”

Cheen scowls. “I’m serious, Mando!”

“You just want me to put in a good word with Karga.”

“Do I look like a moof-milker? Of course I want that! He sent a Mandalorian— _the_ Mandalorian after me. And do you think the only thing my client will do is curse me from the Core to the Rim and back? I know when I’m neck-deep in bantha crap. I know when it’s time to stop.”

Din wonders how much of this was influenced by whatever conversation Cheen had with Luke and how much of it was Cheen reevaluating his life while waiting alone in the temple. Greef will be relieved knowing he’ll have one less wayward bounty hunter to deal with, plus Cheen’s information could lead them to that mysterious client who also poses a potential threat to Grogu and Luke. 

“Fine,” he says. “I’ll talk with Karga. Can’t promise anything, though. He was pretty angry with you when he gave me your bounty puck.”

“Yeah, the Mythrol warned me,” Cheen says. “But I had to try.”

“You need to make better decisions,” Din observes. “Like not going behind the guild and not kicking a beskar helmet thinking that’ll help you get away from a Mandalorian.”

Cheen grumbles something about learning lessons, Jawas, and Ewoks while turning his back on Din, ending the conversation. Shaking his head, Din sits down near the fire, facing the stairs. He needs to take stock of his own equipment and gear. Once he returns to Nevarro, he needs to resupply and replace before heading back out with the next bounty Greef gives him. He removes his vambraces and gets to work.

He loses track of time. When he looks up, he realizes it is much darker outside the temple… and that the rainfall sounds much lighter. Something appears to glow outside, a faint stream of white light filtering through the clouds. He sheathes his vibro-knife in his boot, gets up, and goes to the entrance. He looks out at Vos-3; it is still raining steadily but it no longer pours. Lightning crackles infrequently, silently. The cloud cover has thinned enough that the light of one of the moons is finally piercing through the dark.

“There’s moonlight,” Din breathes.

He looks over his shoulder to see Cheen squinting at him and the moonbeam. The Rodian realizes what he’s looking at and sits up straight.

“Can we leave now?”

Light flashes and a distant rumble nearly drowns out the pitter-patter of rain and Cheen’s disappointed groan. He slams his head back against the stone wall and swears.

“Tomorrow,” Din says.

He looks around and realizes Luke hasn’t come back down.The Jedi must’ve lost track of time again. With a sigh, Din grabs a canteen to fill with rainwater. He goes back to grab a ration pack and points at the other canteens. “I expect those to be filled, Cheen. Only have enough water on the ship for myself.”

Cheen scowls. “Is that a threat? Were you going to put me in carbonite the whole time?”

“I changed my mind. Don’t make me change it back.”

He goes up the stairs before Cheen starts hurling insults at him. He walks down the hall to the ritual room and slows to a stop at the entryway. He now sees why the builders of this temple chose not to wall off the fourth floor like they did all other floors. Up here, he has a better view of the thinning stormclouds, of the storm rolling across the sky away from here. It still rains but moonlight illuminates the flooded town and surrounding forest. Din wonders what the view could be like without any clouds. How bright is the night when the planet is surrounded by three moons? How well can they see the stars?

Luke is sitting cross-legged on the dais and one of the newly recovered texts is near his right hand. Rocks float in the air and Din hesitates to cross the room. When he looks at Luke, though, the floating rocks move to either side, clearing a path for him. Din follows it up onto the dais and the Jedi’s side. He looks around and sees the other two texts piled on top of Luke’s folded cloak next to an intact pillar.

“Here,” Din says, holding out the canteen and ration. “In case you forgot to eat again.”

Luke takes them from him and sets them aside. He doesn’t once look away from the sublime view of Vos-3.

“This is why they didn’t enclose this room,” Luke says softly. “Look at this. I can spend hours here communing with the Force. If it weren’t for the storms, I’d come back here again to meditate.”

“Once is enough for me,” Din replies.

Luke smiles. “It wasn’t all that bad, was it?”

Din thinks about the insufferable Rodian, the relentless thunderstorm and the gloomy isolation, and then he thinks about the Jedi with the bright smile and optimism for better days. He thinks about the Darksaber on his belt and on his mind, the promise Bo-Katan made him, and he thinks about Luke’s name and the rain-soaked kisses, the way Luke pressed his forehead to the helmet like he knew exactly what it meant.

“I guess not.”

He looks down at the Jedi and the faint glow of diffused moonlight on his face, and there is a sudden lurching feeling in his chest, a desperate need to kiss him. Din swallows hard and it must’ve been audible because Luke’s gaze sharpens and he is on his feet, stepping into Din’s space without hesitation.

“You can kiss me, you know,” Luke says. He takes something from his belt and holds it out. It’s a strip of tattered black cloth, ripped from the ends of his cloak.

Din’s mouth is suddenly dry. “You knew I’d come here.”

Luke shrugs. “Just a guess.”

Din suspects otherwise but what does he know about the Force? He slowly pulls his gloves off and drops them, then takes the strip of cloth and covers Luke’s bright eyes. His fingers shake and blood pounds in his head as he tightens the knot. His hands don’t fall away; they linger around Luke’s head, touching his light hair and the tips of his ears and tracing the curve of his jaw. He sees and feels how Luke trembles, breaths light and fast, anticipating what comes next.

“Can I?” Luke whispers. His hands are already reaching up for the helmet but they stop short of touching the beskar. 

Oh, how Din’s heart paces, faster and faster until it hurts. Other than IG-11, he’d been the only one to ever take off his helmet and the only one to ever put it back on. Once upon a time, he never would’ve dreamed of letting anybody else take it off of his head. It would have been too intimate, too violating, too dangerous. But he knows he’s in no danger around this Jedi. No creed is being broken. And he wants, he _wants_ , to not be alone, to have what Luke is offering him.

His throat is tight and the word so small as it squeezes past his lips but he still says it. “Yes.”

Luke is so careful lifting it off his head and just as careful setting it aside with a gesture. A cool damp breeze swirls around Din, raking through his hair and carrying the scent of rain and lightning. Without the visor, he can see the golden sheen of Luke’s hair and the warm tones of his skin, the red tint of his lips and the flush spreading over his face. The only thing Din can’t see is the blue of his eyes but that is a price he’s willing to pay.

“What are you waiting for?” Luke asks.

He doesn’t know. He leans in, hand unsteady as he tips Luke’s face up to his. Luke rises up to meet him like he knows Din needs that nudge, that push off the ledge. His mouth is as soft as Din remembers it, warm and bittersweet even without the rain. The storm is ever present and the wind so cold, but all Din can think is how warm Luke is. All he can feel is this overwhelming need to stay with Luke, to be in his orbit like a planet revolving around a brilliant star.

Every kiss steals more of his breath away until he feels like he’s drowning. He’s hot and dizzy and just this side of overwhelmed; he presses his forehead to Luke’s, trying to catch his breath but unwilling to break contact. After so many years keeping his distance, so many years with barriers between him and the galaxy, he wants to touch and to feel constantly.

“Hey,” Luke murmurs, his mouth brushing against Din’s as he speaks. “Are you okay?”

“I—I’m fine,” he says. His voice cracks and he swallows. “Just not… I’m not used to this.”

He feels Luke smile. “I had a feeling. Not easy letting anyone in when you got all this beskar protecting you.”

“Not just beskar. Whatever I could get my hands on, whatever that can hide me, I used it. We all did. Our secrecy was our survival.”

His breath hitches at the hands touching his face lightly, tracing its shape like Luke is memorizing it by touch. Then Luke tilts his head just so, his mouth a hair’s breadth from Din’s, and says, “Your secrets are safe with me.”

Heart lurching, Din kisses him fiercely. It’s a chain reaction; Luke makes a sound, a strangled moan, and returns it with the same searing intensity, pushing him back until they collide with a pillar. Luke presses up against him, a wall of heat in his arms that gets hotter and hotter with every passing second and with every kiss. There is power here in the guise of a Jedi, and all it wants is to be with him.

His knees buckle and he hoarsely says, “I need to sit.”

“Okay,” Luke says readily and follows him as he slides down against the pillar to the cold floor.

Din tries to catch his breath, tries to hold himself together because it’s been such a terribly long time since he allowed himself anything approaching intimacy. Then Luke settles in his lap, curling around him like he can’t stand to be away for too long. Din looks up at the Jedi, struck by how disheveled and flushed Luke is, and leans up to kiss his slick, swollen mouth. He feels rather than hears the sounds Luke makes at the back of his throat, low moans that sink to the pit of his stomach and pool like melted beskar. He wraps his arms around Luke’s waist and pulls the Jedi close, dragging a hand down the curve of his spine and wondering what it would be like to touch bare skin and not black fabric. 

Luke won’t stop touching his face, stroking the curve of his cheekbones, the shell of his ears, his jaw, his chin, his mouth. He is so careful with his gloved cybernetic hand but it’s his left hand that sinks into Din’s dark hair, the callused fingers on it that skim over skin and stubble, that press against his lip, the curve of his nose, his brow. Every touch makes Din shiver, makes his blood sing, and all he can do is hold the Jedi close and kiss him in return. 

“How far do you want to take this?” Luke asks. He shifts, trembling, brimming with energy that has nowhere to go.

Din doesn’t know. He can’t think like this. He can’t think at all. “I… I don’t….”

“If you want me to stop, I can stop,” Luke says. 

He nods and tries to unstick the words at the back of his throat. He wants to say this is enough, that he’s already drowning and can only take so much in a night. “This is… okay.”

Somehow, Luke can still hear all of his thoughts in three short, halting words. He smiles and presses his forehead to Din’s, whispering, “Okay.”

Din kisses him and this time it is slow and careful. He reaches up to cradle Luke’s face in his hands as they kiss and kiss and kiss, feeling the heat under his fingertips, the rapid thumps of a pulse on his neck, the soft silk of his hair. They kiss and touch until they’re breathless and weary. Luke stays curled up around him, warm and safe, and he makes a soft sound when Din wraps his arms around the Jedi and pulls him even closer. Din looks over Luke’s shoulder at the sky, the moonlight becoming stronger as the clouds slowly disperse and the rainfall slows.

Eventually, Luke says, “It’s been a while for me, too.”

Din nods and buries his face in Luke’s shoulder, shielding it from the rest of the night.

* * *

He dreams of standing in the dark fog of Corvus’s stripped forest, holding the Darksaber in his hands and facing down the silhouette of a person. They circle around each other for hours, every step slow and measured. He can’t see their face but he feels the weight of their eyes as they study the Darksaber with deep hunger. He has no choice but to remain vigilant until he wakes.

There is no forest of barren trees, no thick gray fog, no one challenging him for the Darksaber. There is light on the horizon and rain falling in scattered showers. Din stares at the predawn glow and then realizes he is feeling a cool wind on his bared face. Where is his helmet? He looks around and his eyes fall on it sitting next to his left hand. His right hand is going numb but he can’t extricate it from where it wraps around and holds Luke close to him. The Jedi is fast asleep, still blindfolded, and doesn’t stir when Din puts the helmet back on. He feels… safe, but it is a watchful one. It is his creed, which has slowly been shattering and rebuilding over the months since he first found Grogu.

When Din wakes again, he is alone. Or perhaps he isn’t; as he sits up, he spots Luke sitting cross-legged on the ledge, staring out at the cold morning sky. The blindfold is nowhere to be seen. Din slowly gets up, wincing at the crick in his neck and the soreness all over his body; perhaps he should have found a more comfortable place to sleep. He rolls his shoulders and his neck while walking over to the ledge and looking at the gray mist rising from the verdant woods. Water drips from above, plinking wherever it lands on beskar.

They watch the sun slowly rise in the clear sky. The storm is but a dark line in the distance, fading fast. 

Luke turns and looks up at him. His hair could be golden in the sunlight, tousled and wild. His eyes could be as blue as the sky, bright and serene. He smiles and gets to his feet, leaning forward and up to touch his forehead to Din’s helmeted one.

“Ready?” Luke asks.

“Yes.”

They return to the first floor to see Cheen standing at the entrance and staring out longingly at the forest beyond the abandoned town. If Din is being honest, he half expected the Rodian to have hightailed it out of the temple once the storm ended. Then again, he wouldn’t make it far with cuffed hands and only himself to pilot a repurposed Imperial barge. 

Cheen stares at them for a few long seconds, then sighs and shakes his head while trudging back to the smoldering fire.

“Guess it’s back to Nevarro for me,” Cheen says. He seems determined to pretend he wasn’t left alone all night. “Where’s your ship, Mando?”

“Two days’ walk from here,” Din replies. He starts scuffing dirt at the fire, suffocating the embers. “So we’d better get moving.”

Both Luke and Cheen stare at him. Cheen then grumbles and kicks at the ground.

“Kriffing poodoo. Tell me that was a joke.”

“It’s not. I didn’t want you to know I was coming so I landed as far away as possible.” Din checks the other canteens to find they’re all filled with water. “You never knew I was following you.”

Cheen turns to Luke. “X-Wing, right? I bet I can fit in the back of your tiny cockpit. Come on, Jedi, what do you say?”

Luke shrugs. “Sorry, Cheen. Not my decision to make.”

While Cheen starts cursing up a storm and blaming everything he lays his eyes on, Luke goes up to Din and asks,. “Can we go to my X-Wing first?”

“Why?” Din then remembers seeing the starfighter lying on its side, nose buried in the soft turf. “I don’t think three people can pull it out of the mud.”

“No, I can do that. I was just thinking that maybe you could record a message for Grogu. Let him know you’re doing all right.”

Din is speechless. The thought had never crossed his mind. For the longest time he thought it was safer not knowing where the Jedi took Grogu or how to contact them, but these past days told him it was a mistake to think that way. What he would give to be face to face with the kid again, to see his large eyes and hear him vocalize. That isn’t an option but what Luke offers is the second best thing.

He wants to press his forehead to Luke’s but Cheen is nearby and so he says, “I’d like that.”

Luke beams.

The ground outside is a quagmire that sucks their feet in and refuses to let go. Cheen complains constantly as they slowly pick their way across the soft, sticky ground. Din almost falls over several times and Luke nearly loses a boot. When they reach the edge of the forest and higher ground that is still soggy from the rain, they’re splattered in mud and exhausted. When they find a creek, nobody hesitates to wade into the icy cold water to wash off the muck.

Din scans their surroundings as they trek to Luke’s starfighter, searching for aggressive signatures among the native fauna. He only picks up smaller, seemingly harmless wildlife that either scatter or watch three people walking—and complaining—through the dense forest. Cheen starts loudly wondering if there even is an X-Wing when they finally come to the sloping clearing. The Rodian chokes on his words at the sight of the toppled starfighter at the bottom of the hill.

“I’m not pulling that scrap out of the mud. I’m just a Rodian with a bad foot, kriffing hell-”

Din sighs. “Will you stop?”

Luke strides downhill ahead of them. He stops in front of the X-Wing, paces around it to see how deeply it is entrenched in the soft ground, comes to some sort of decision, and steps back. He looks over his shoulder at Din and Cheen before raising a hand. With a rumble and a groan, the X-Wing shakes itself and slowly lifts from the sticky thick mud. Luke holds it in the air for a few seconds and then lets it settle upright on more solid ground.

“ _Kriff_ ,” the Rodian utters faintly. “My guys never had a chance.”

Din walks down to the starfighter, watching Luke crawl all over it to check for dents and broken parts. He looks up at the ship’s canopy as it opens and Luke leans in to drop his trove of relics and data.

“Can it fly?”

“No idea,” Luke says. 

He slides into the cockpit headfirst, rights himself, and starts a systems check while Din looks around the clearing. He makes a gesture at Cheen to not sneak off. Behind him, the X-Wing suddenly hums to life as the power generator comes online.

“It can fly!” The Jedi hauls himself back out of the cockpit and shimmies down the side to the wing, then drops to the ground. He points up at it and says, “You can record whatever you want to tell him.”

Din nods and hands Luke the beskar staff and satchel of supplies, and steps up to the X-Wing. He looks at the faint traces of blaster fire, scorch marks and scrapes, and remembers Luke once mentioning it sank into a swamp and had to be pulled out. He wonders what sort of pilot the Jedi is as he climbs up into the cockpit. He stares at the controls, both simplified and more complex than his beloved lost _Razor Crest_ and then searches for the switches that’ll capture his voice for Grogu to hear.

“I have no idea if this is working,” he mutters while watching the blinking light. “But if it does… hey, kid. It’s been… it’s been a while. You’re probably wondering how the Jedi, how _Luke_ got this message to you. I’ve been picking up jobs to get a new ship and one of them took me to Vos-3.”

Does he need to say anything about his time here? “Listen. I… hope you’re doing all right wherever you are. You’re finally where you belong. I’ve seen the things Luke can do with his powers—with the Force. One day you’ll be able to do that, too.” 

He sighs. “I know we live very different lives now, but you’re not just a Jedi. You’re a Mandalorian, too. You and I, we’re still a clan of two. We’ll see each other again, I promise. And, uh, listen to Luke when he tells you to do something. And don’t eat everything that moves.”

What else is there to say? “May… may the Force be with you, Grogu.”

He ends the recording and sits back in the cockpit, staring up through the opened canopy at the intensely blue sky. He wonders when and where he’ll see Grogu again. He wonders how they’ll cross paths. He has to hope they’ll reunite under better circumstances than their first meeting, and that Luke will also be there.

Din climbs out of the cockpit and jumps down from the X-Wing. Luke is standing with his back to the starfighter, holding the beskar staff loosely while watching Cheen up on the slope. The Rodian is sitting on a rotting moss-covered tree stump, looking miserably bored. He’s also looking away from them.

Luke turns around and holds out the staff and satchel. “I guess your words are only for him.”

“Yes.” He hooks the staff onto his back and shoulders the satchel. “Thank you.”

“It’s the least I can do,” Luke says, shrugging, looking elsewhere. A soft blush blooms on his face as he drags a hand through his hair. “I mean. I didn’t exactly leave you a way to contact us once you were somewhere safer than an Imperial cruiser. And even though I said I’ll—I didn’t give you the coordinates yet, did I?”

He turns and climbs up into the X-Wing again. A minute later, the receiver on Din’s left vambrace alerts him to a small data packet. Luke slides back out the starfighter and flashes Din a sheepish grin.

“You got them? Okay. If a New Republic patrol tries to stop you, just tell them you’re with me and they’ll let you pass. They have to if they don’t want to get in trouble with my sister.” He laughs softly at a memory. “Anyway. It’s… I guess it’s time to leave and get back to Leia to explain what happened and why I didn’t see her holo—she’s my sister, by the way. I need to tell her before she sends a whole fleet after me.”

Luke makes no move to return to the X-Wing’s cockpit. Instead he stares at the ground, at the treeline, at the distant shadows on the horizon where the storm is retreating. He then looks at Din. “Think we’ll run into each other again?”

“I promised Grogu we’ll meet again. I… hope you’ll also be there, and that it’ll be under better circumstances.” Din tilts his head at Cheen’s sulking form but his hand settles on the Darksaber’s hilt. “I hadn’t heard from Bo-Katan in a while when I came here. I have a feeling that won’t last.”

“Then I’d better start paying attention to any news coming out of the Mandalorian sector.”

“I have no idea what to expect,” Din admits. He really doesn’t and needs to pick up the Armorer’s trail as soon as the gunship can fly. She’ll know the old songs, the old stories. She might even know Bo-Katan’s story.

“Does anyone ever?” Luke glances at the opened cockpit, steeling himself. Then, “Wait.”

He reaches for something in his belt and Din’s heart skips too many beats when he draws out a familiar strip of black cloth. Luke straightens it out, then looks up at Din’s helmeted face and then his left arm. 

“May I?” he asks.

Din holds out his left hand without a second thought, expecting Luke to place it in his palm, but the Jedi instead steps into his space and wraps the cloth around his upper arm. There’s a look of intense concentration on his face as he knots it so that it’s snug without being too tight. He tucks in the ends to keep them from tangling in other things and then steps back. And Din exhales.

“Until we meet again,” Luke says quietly. It sounds like a blessing and a promise, spoken with such soft reverence and warmth.

Din reaches out and presses his forehead to Luke’s. Behind his helmet, he closes his eyes tightly and he’s grateful the helmet modulates the shaking in his voice as he says, “Thank you. And—and take care of him. For me.”

“I will. May the Force be with you, Din.”

Din steps away and turns to walk back up the slope to the waiting Rodian while Luke climbs up into his X-Wing. Minutes later, the air stirs as the starfighter rises up into the sky. Din and Cheen both look up as the X-Wing circles around the clearing and then soars out of the planet’s atmosphere to the stars.

The Rodian sighs loudly and gets to his feet. “Two days?”

Din stares at the blue sky for a little longer before facing their pathway through the woods. “Yes. Let’s go.”

* * *

* * *

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I cannot believe how fast I put together a little bit of art for this story. I cannot believe how fast the story came to me, how fast I wrote it, and how fast I got the entire story to post. 
> 
> Thank you for sticking around for all five chapters. Your comments have all been so lovely and supportive and joyous to read. 
> 
> There may be a second story in the works. Fingers crossed.
> 
> _This is the way._

**Author's Note:**

> Fair warning that I didn't watch Revenge of the Sith, Clone Wars, or Rebels, didn't read any comics or books, and whatever I didn't pick up from the other movies and The Mando Show, I got from the Star Wars wiki. I'm going to bullshit my way through Star Wars lore, don't @ me.


End file.
